Yesterday, I received my copy of Hunter Baker’s The End of Secularism. I’ll fill you in on the yummy details when I can. You can listen to him on Moody’s Prime Time America from a link on his blog.

Robert Feldman from the University of Massachusetts talks about his research into our patterns of bearing false witness. In short, we lie a lot.

“We are not very good at detecting deception in other people,” Feldman says. “When we are trying to detect honesty, we look at the wrong kinds of nonverbal behaviors, and we misinterpret them.”

On this topic, some researchers think lying is mentally harder than telling the truth, so asking suspect to do something specific while recounting their story could help separate the liars from the honest. Of course, some people can’t handle the truth and make themselves look bad.

In related news from our How Things Have Changed Department, Time magazine has an old article on the lies presidents have told us.

In 1960, when the Russians shot down Gary Powers’ U2 spy plane, it was the Secretary of State, not President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who claimed a weather-research plane had gone off course. “So intense was the desire to not have the President lie,” says presidential historian Michael Beschloss, “to not break the bond of trust with the American people, it was left to others. Eisenhower never spoke an untruth.” Of course, Ike was never the focus of an investigation by a grand jury, either.

Russell Moore on Hunter Baker’s The End of Secularism, also known as “The Sky Has Fallen: What I Learned While Dating Bertrand Russell.”

From the Times Literary Supplement: “Ronald Fritze, a historian and dean at Athens State University in Alabama, is concerned about, and clearly fascinated by, the pseudo-histories and pseudo-sciences . . .” The article goes on to describe his work, and the writer of the article appears to have trouble with discernible truth and passionate lies.

“But, how do we reckon with the fact that pseudo-historians also insist on their stories’ truth? Through evidence and “objective” empirical methods, Fritze tells us, again without raising any questions of method and evidence. While objective historians look at all the facts, guarding themselves against presuppositions, pseudo-historians choose only those that support their case.”

Because insisting on the truth of something does not make it true. Imagine that.

Joel Belz asks, “Are poor people poor because they’re paying the price for their own personal failures—or because the systems in which they find themselves have been broken and have failed the people within them?” A new book offers a sound, biblical answer.

Authors Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson have a book released today on last year’s election, The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election. World’s blog points to some details about who John McCain had on his vice-presidential running mates list and how those who vetted Mrs. Palin believed she could be a great VP, though probably not on Day One. “She had knocked some of the broader questions out of the park, [former White House counsel A.B. Culvahouse] told McCain. She would not necessarily be ready on Jan. 20, 2009, to be vice president, but in his estimation few candidates ever are.”

On The Politico, the authors discuss Senator Kennedy’s reaction to former president Bill Clinton’s treatment of candidate Obama.

Beauty was once the goal, at least in part, of art, music, and poetry. Now, it is the antithesis of them, states Roger Scruton, who has written a book on the subject.

Of course, there were great artists who tried to rescue beauty from the perceived disruption of modern society—as T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land. And there were others, particularly in America, who refused to see the sordid and the transgressive as the truth of the modern world. For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise. Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality, which previously signified aesthetic failure, became marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty became a retreat from the real task of artistic creation. This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting the philosopher Arthur Danto to argue recently that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status and another social role.