I’ve got a good feeling:

Timothy Dolan, 59, widely seen as affable and an extrovert, is expected to use the position to more vocally advance issues close to the U.S. Catholic Church, including poverty relief and opposition to abortion.

“He’ll be critical of the Obama administration on abortion, but he’ll be willing to work with them on other issues of justice and peace,” said Father Tom Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

Dolan, like other prominent U.S. Catholic leaders, faces enormous challenges including healing wounds from a sexual abuse scandal that cost the U.S. church some $2 billion in settlement payments with victims.

He replaces Cardinal Edward Egan, 76, who kept a lower profile and was more distant from the clergy, critics say, and who is retiring after nearly nine years as archbishop.

“It is the premier bully-pulpit in the American Catholic Church and I think there is pretty much universal agreement that during the Egan years, that bully-pulpit was underutilized,” said John Allen, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter.

This is great analysis from a Yale grad student:

“At the very root of the crisis is a crisis of confidence in the system,” observed Walker, “proving that capitalism cannot survive without a moral framework.”  She believes the time is finally ripe for ethics education.  “There is more of an ‘aha’ [now] when you speak about ethics.  People are really getting it.  It’s getting to them personally.” As she sees it, the future will hold even more demand for the kind of work she does.  “There will be a backlash.  People will be angry at banks and regulations, which will lead to more regulation, more calls on Congress.  This will increase the demand for ethics consulting and training.”

You know, the kind that we all are, that is the basis of American democracy.  Not, you know, liberal like left-wing and opposed to conservative.  Anyways, Alan Wolfe has a new book where he talks about being liberal and what it means, and it looks pretty interesting:

But, as he argues himself in this engaging new book, The Future of Liberalism, liberalism is more than a temperament; it is also a political tradition with substantive commitments—a body of ideas—and it has, as well, a dedication to fair procedures, impartially administered, legitimated by the consent of the people. Temperament, substance, procedure can all be liberal, and understanding liberalism requires a grasp of all three and of the connections among them. Wolfe’s distinctive claim, however, is that the key to liberalism is a set of dispositions, or habits of mind—seven of them, in fact, each of which gets its own chapter.

Four of these dispositions will be quite familiar: “a sympathy for equality,” “an inclination to deliberate,” “a commitment to tolerance,” and “an appreciation of openness.” We’re used to the portrayal: liberals as talky, tolerant, open-minded, egalitarians. It’s not surprising, then, that these types are at home in the garrulous world of the academy—or that bossy preachers, convinced they have the one true story, do not care for them much. But Wolfe’s sketch of the liberal adds three unfamiliar elements to the picture: “a disposition to grow,” “a preference for realism,” and “a taste for governance.”

Or at least stop creepy anti-feminist movements.  This is a great story.

A debate:

The two reviews set out competing visions of how to improve primary education. For Sir Jim, the main problem is curriculum overload, generated by empire-building subject specialists and a repeated reluctance to remove old material when adding new. His solution is twofold: to reaffirm the primacy of a “core curriculum”, adding computer skills to the literacy and numeracy now granted this status, and to replace the 12 subjects now taught, plus the foreign language soon to be added, by six cross-cutting “areas of learning”.

The Cambridge team offers a different diagnosis of the problem, and therefore quite different medicine. The problem, they think, is not so much curricular overcrowding, but that a narrow diet of literacy and numeracy has pushed pretty much everything else to the sidelines. School inspections, teacher training, pupil assessment and political populism all reinforce the message that only these “basics” count. That means they are allocated most time and that little attention is paid to the quality of teaching in other subjects. Such dumbing-down is self-defeating, they say: studies show again and again that a broad, rich and balanced curriculum, far from distracting from the basics, is actually a prerequisite for high standards in them.

His story is just so powerful and inspiring.  An article about the canonization here and another bit here about his life:

Bell said Damien’s concern for others was a model for all the faithful today, particularly the young.

“Father Damien’s example helps us to not forget those who are forgettable in the world,” he said.

I’m not that worried about this doctrine for a few reasons: (1) I don’t think this will ever be passed, and (2) it’s sort of impossible for it to work even if it would be passed, in that there are just so many more media options than there used to be.  Actually, that’s why I think the fairness doctrine itself is not really that necessary.  Of course, this ignores that basic TV and papers ignore what’s really important in the world for what’s sensational, but that has much more to do with substance/sensation than with liberal/conservative.  Anyways, here’s the article:

A move to require broadcasters to provide equal time to all sides of controversial issues has religious radio programs worried, even though no formal proposal has been introduced and the White House likely wouldn’t support it.

At issue is the idea of reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, which policed public airwaves from 1949 to 1987 in hopes of giving voice to all sides of an issue. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) scrapped the policy when it was judged ineffective and a possible violation of free-speech rights.

Reviving the policy has been popular among liberals who feel shut out of conservative-dominated talk radio, and has attracted the support of everyone from former President Bill Clinton to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Look, it’s just contingent that this public good happened to exist in a way the government didn’t have to pay for it.  Now it should.  We need subsidized journalism just like we need subsidized cops and firefighters.

This is no time for Internet triumphalism: the stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and–particularly at the metropolitan, regional, and state levels–the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country. Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.

This is a great article from Paul Elie about the problems of being the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Reading his books, I’d been struck by his confident account of the life of faith as “human actions that seek to be open to God’s action.” How, I asked, did he hope God would act in the crisis?

He paused, steepling his fingers, then answered carefully. “I think the challenge that God is putting to us is this: Granted the differences of conviction, with how much positive expectation and patience can you approach the other? It doesn’t mean you stay together at any price, but it is a matter of whether we can demonstrate to the world a slightly different mode of operation than that which the world commonly operates with.”

This is my hope anyways.  We’ll see.

But I know that the reasons people think Conan will fail are erroneous. The prevailing theory is that his comedy—and indeed his personality—are simply too weird for the kind of mass audience NBC wants to draw to The Tonight Show. “As Conan Goes West, Where Will the Humor Go?” asks an indicative piece in Sunday’s Boston Globe arguing that Conan will have to “graduate” from perpetual immaturity—from characters like the “Masturbating Bear,” a frequent guest—to succeed. But while it’s true that Conan’s brand of comedy is not exactly like Leno’s, I think this attitude both misses the point of what makes The Tonight Show successful and under-rates Conan’s ability to connect with a broad audience.