Representatives of autocratic theocracies that finance terror, oppress women and consider homosexuality a capital crime are welcomed at Harvard and other campuses. But not the U.S. Marines. . . .

When terrorism goes to the movies in the post-Sept. 11 world, we might expect the plots, characters and themes to reflect some sort of believable reality. But in Hollywood, the politically correct impulse now overrides all else. Even the spectacular pyrotechnics, beautiful people and accomplished acting cannot hide it. . . .

Storm the barricades! According to researcher George Barna, we're in the midst of a "spiritual revolution that is reshaping Christianity, personal faith, corporate religious experience, and the moral contours of the nation."

Who's leading the coup d'état? Some 20 million people, dubbed Revolutionaries, who live "a first-century lifestyle based on faith, goodness, love, generosity, kindness, and simplicity" and who "zealously pursue an intimate relationship with God."

If true, this is amazing news, the best for American Christians in generations.

But before we break out the party poppers, we should note that, like every revolution, this one has a loser: the local church. . . .

At colleges across the country, 58 women will enroll as freshmen for every 42 men. And as the class of 2010 proceeds toward graduation, the male numbers will dwindle. Because more men than women drop out, the ratio after four years will be 60--40, according to projections by the Department of Education. . . .

During the last five days before Christmas, at least 55,000 people were planning to attend the eight multi-media worship services at Willow Creek Community Church.

The leaders of this famous megachurch outside Chicago can be precise about this number because that is how many people had, at mid-week, visited WillowCreek.org and claimed seats in the 7,200-seat auditorium. A few solo seats remained. . . .

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan--From the air, the town of Balakot, at the lip of the Kaghan Valley in Pakistan's mountainous North-West Frontier Province, resembles pictures of Hiroshima circa late summer 1945: All but a few buildings have been reduced absolutely to rubble. There were some 50,000 people in this town on the morning of Oct. 8; a six-second earthquake that day killed an estimated 16,000 outright. Now survivors live mainly in scattered tent villages, not all of them properly winterized. And winter has begun.

The people of Balakot and dozens of other devastated towns are much on the mind of Rear Adm. Michael A. LeFever, 51, the man in charge of the U.S. military's 1,000-man, $110 million-and-counting relief effort here. "I'll never forget landing and smelling gangrene and smelling death," he says of his first trip to the disaster zone where 73,000 died. "The first couple of days were overwhelming."

But any effort commanding widespread support will have to proceed on the basis of sober and disinterested realism, with complete honesty about the risks, and costs, and tradeoffs involved.

And there’s the rub: in the fractious atmosphere of contemporary American public discourse, sober and disinterested realism seems well on the way to becoming extinct. In particular, our understanding of what happened with Katrina has been so tainted and distorted by sensationalism, emotional oversimplification, and ideological opportunism that it may require a miracle for Americans to think through clearly what needs to be done.

Perhaps the foremost culprit in this regard are the mainstream mass media. If one had no evidence beyond the wild journalistic coverage of events as they were unfolding, one would have thought that the fury and carnage of Hurricane Katrina, and the widespread suffering in its aftermath, rather than representing what used to be called an “act of God,” could be blamed entirely on the crimes of commission and omission perpetrated by political leaders, and chiefly President George W. Bush. . . .

When people ask why I recently left The Wall Street Journal to join the Marines, I usually have a short answer. It felt like the time had come to stop reporting events and get more directly involved. But that's not the whole answer, and how I got to this point wasn't a straight line. . . .

When last we visited the Mirecki files, the unhinged professor was on the verge of suing his university and the local sheriff's department for insufficient support and the direction of the criminal investigation.

Now, the university has fired its own salvo--standing firm on its report that Mirecki voluntarily resigned as chairman of the religious studies department last week. . . .