She Says You're Not There and I Should Take Care

A few Friday morning links to articles/editorials/columns that I thought everyone might enjoy:

• Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal on Mitt Romney's speech yesterday in College Station at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library: "Mormon in America"
• "The nation’s founders knew the answer to that question says nothing about a candidate’s fitness for office. It’s tragic to see it being asked at a time when Americans need a president who will tell the truth, lead with conviction and restore the nation’s moral standing, not one who happens to attend a particular church."--The NY Times editorial board in "The Crisis of Faith."
• "Religion can certainly be conducive to freedom. But does freedom require religion? Is religion always conducive to freedom? Does freedom not also thrive in far more secular societies than our own? Isn't the better course for our nation to seek solidarity among lovers of liberty, secular as well as religious? After all, as the Princeton scholar Jeffrey Stout has noted, it was a coalition of believers and secularists that sent a communist dictatorship tumbling down in Pope John Paul II's native Poland."-- E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post in "Boldness, Watered Down."
• "Romney’s job yesterday was to unite social conservatives behind him. If he succeeded, he did it in two ways. He asked people to rally around the best traditions of America’s civic religion. He also asked people to submerge their religious convictions for the sake of solidarity in a culture war without end."--David Brooks of the NY Times in "Faith v. the Faithless."
• "Hollywood is in somewhat the same position as Las Vegas these days. It went from being the capital of sin to Disneyland, and now it’s landed somewhere in between. It tries to keep the sins hidden away and outwardly present itself as a defender of American virtues: justice, individual freedom, and the power of one innocent soul to save the world. The Golden Compass should not offend, or be controversial at all, Weitz swears. It will certainly not, heaven forbid, offer any critique of religion. 'The movie’s first job is to beguile the audience for a couple of hours,' he says, and that much it can promise to do."--Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic Monthly in "How Hollywood Saved God."
• "When Barry Bonds walks into the Phillip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco on Friday, it will be only the beginning of an unpredictable legal odyssey. A few days after the fourth anniversary of his BALCO grand jury testimony, Bonds will surrender to U.S. marshals, go through the bureaucratic rigmarole of being arrested and later appear in court to enter a plea on four counts of perjury and one of obstructing justice."--Mark Fainaru-Wade and T.J. Quinn of ESPN.com in "Answers to Key Questions as Bonds Begins Legal Journey."