Rod is a columnist and editorial writer at the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons," a 2006 book about right-wingers whose traditionalist conservatism puts them out of step sometimes with mainstream Republicans. He writes the Crunchy Con blog on Beliefnet.com, is a contributing editor to Touchstone magazine and a monthly columnist with La Press in Montreal. Rod is a former writer for National Review magazine, a former chief film critic for the New York Post, and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio and other national outlets. He lives with his wife and three children in Dallas, where they attend St. Seraphim's Orthodox Cathedral (OCA). They were chrismated in July 2006.

On our society's increasing inability to distinguish good and evil:

That's at the heart of the crisis of meaning that we now face in this society. People are so afraid to assert that there is such a thing as an objective standard of good and evil, because they're so afraid of being judged. I think what happens is that we've gotten in to such a habit of not being judgmental and not applying these standards that we no longer think there is even such a thing as a standard, that there is a truth that can be known and discovered and lived.

So what happens is we get in to these situations in society where people are behaving in ways-we're confronted with behavior, with art, with all sorts of phenomena in popular culture-that are objectively evil. We may know in our hearts that it is evil, but we're afraid to say so, and over time we get to the position where we don't recognize it when it's right in front of us because we have disarmed ourselves morally by being afraid to be judgmental.

On social pressures to "move on" after a tragedy:

There is such a tendency in this culture to be optimistic. There's a difference between optimism and hope. We can be hopeful even in the midst of our suffering. We're called to be hopeful. We can't commit the sin of despair. But in this culture we're so therapeutic, we feel like we have to be optimistic-move on, get on with your life-and I think if we do that, we sometimes leave a lot left unhealed and un-dealt with.

I think there is also a tendency-and it's a very human tendency-to want to find an explanation, a ready explanation for eruptions of absolute evil in the world, like what we saw at Virginia Tech. Some people want to blame guns, or they want to blame pop culture entirely, or the university, or liberalism, or conservatism. Whatever. I think this is all a self-defense mechanism, as a way to keep from having to confront the idea that there is such a thing as radical evil; we can't always stop it; our death can come for us at any moment; and we're not ready for it.

On his conversion to Orthodox Christianity:

I had kids, and I had to face the fact that in Catholicism in America today, you don't get the doctrine taught and you don't have real communities. You don't have worship at the level that I and my family needed to sustain our Christian commitment in this pagan world, especially working in the media. And as our children got older we realized that we had to have a Christian community grounded in the unchanging truth in order to raise our kids to be good Christians and morally sane.

We washed up on the shores of Orthodoxy in desperation. After having suffered a lot in the Catholic Church, we didn't intend to convert. But the more we started going to the Orthodox liturgy, and getting to know Orthodox people and our good bishop, the more we saw, "This is where the truth is. This is where love is. These people are our family now." And so we finally came in to the fullness of Orthodoxy last summer.