In comments to this post, *Christopher commended the work of Catholic theologian James Alison. A quick Google search reveals that many of his writings are available online here. I’m somewhat wary of people who rely too much on Rene Girard’s work, only because they often give off a vibe of “Girard has figured out everything!”, but Alison seems like he’s up to some interesting stuff. I’ve printed out this article on the Atonement and hope to read it over the weekend.

Derek the beer-snob has a link to an interesting piece from the rector of St. Mary the Virgin church in NYC on traditional and revisionist language about God.

I think I basically come down in the middle here. I’m for traditional language to name the Trinity, especially in the context of worship, but am open to exploring feminine imagery in our language about God and can see the merit of avoiding gender-specific terms when it doesn’t distort theological truth. The key, it seems to me, is that our language should be a response to God’s self-revelation, not something we make up to feel better about ourselves.

At Faith and Theology Kim Fabricius has ten provocative propositions on peace and war. I might quibble with the notion that the church simply became hopelessly compromised when it sold out to “Constantinianism”; I think this division of church history into pristine “pre-Constantinian” and corrupt “post-Constantinian” eras often fails to take seriously church tradition (not to mention one wonders what it says about our doctrine of Providence). Just war theory, after all, has as long a pedigree in the church as many other post-biblical developments that few would want to throw out.