This morning's Times-Dispatch:

David Brooks quoting Alan Wolfe on what we learn from reading Niebuhr: The devout would learn that public piety corrupts private faith and that faith must play a prophetic role in society. The atheists would learn that some people who believe in God are really, really smart. All of them would learn that good and evil really do exist—and that it is never as easy as it seems to know which is which.

Josiah Bunting on Gen. Marshall: Marshall had no politics at all—literally. He never voted. His was a cultivated disinterestedness, and he saw it as his strongest asset.… As an adolescent he appears to have determined not what he would achieve, or "do," but rather who he would be. He earned his character the old-fashioned way: by successive acts, by accretions of challenges mastered, knowledges attained, obstacles overcome, and solicitations of impulse beaten back. He forced himself, his official biographer once noted, to undertake tasks particularly alien to his talents and interests. Loyal and dutiful in the taut world of military hierarchy, deliberately self-effacing …, he nonetheless spoke up when an unpopular truth compelled articulation.… [Lord Moran said that] "it was not what Marshall did, but what he was, that lingers in the memory."