Unfortunately, that’s as close as I’m going to get. He’s been invited to speak by the Newport Beach Public Library Foundation. Oooh, I just checked his bio at the Atlantic Monthly, and he’s a Harvard PhD who makes a living as a professional blogger. He is Catholic, gay, Republican, a classical (small government) conservative, and in spite of my atheist, straight, Green Party, social-democrat ways, I trust him to filter and color much of my otherwise unmanageable daily avalanche of information and analysis.

It’s my own fault I can’t go hear him speak. This is the weekend before the last week of the semester, and I’m cranking out annotated bibliographies on ritual theory. The fact that I read his words several times a day, every day, dulls the pain of this missed opportunity.

I’ll leave you with a bit of Andrew’s recent political commentary:

The fact that now a majority of Republican candidates proudly support such torture has rendered the GOP the party most inimical to liberty in America. When you combine torture’s evil with the claims of the hard right that a president can ignore all laws and all treaties in wartime, and that “wartime” is now permanent, you have laid the ground for the abolition of the American experiment in self-government … America is in danger. And the danger is coming increasingly from within. This was Osama bin Laden’s hope and plan - to destroy this country’s freedom. He has been more successful than he could have imagined. And he’s still alive to enjoy it.