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Proponents of “trade justice” as part of a comprehensive approach to fighting global poverty often point to rich countries’ agricultural subsidies as a big part of the problem because they create unfair competition for farmers in the developing world. This article offers six reasons that slashing subsidies and trade barriers would be good for people living in rich countries too. Seems like a place where fair traders and free traders could come to some agreement.

For many Protestants the Rosary encapsulates everything that is wrong with Roman Catholicism – an excessive (and perhaps idolatrous) focus on Mary, rote mechanical prayers, and legalism. But is this a fair characterization? And might the Rosary have something to offer Protestants?

The “Praying to Mary” Objection: Since the Rosary consists largely of “Hail Mary”s many Protestants see this as one more instance of Catholic Mariolarty. But Catholics will tell you that these are not prayers to Mary in the sense that one would pray to God the Father or to Jesus, but are requests asking for Mary’s intercession. There seems to be no good argument that it’s wrong in principle to ask for the prayers of the Mother of God, if we allow, as we surely must, that it’s okay to ask for the prayers of other living Christians and that death doesn’t sever us from the Communion of the Saints (this is essentially Robert Jenson’s argument).

The “Vain Repetition” Objection: Do the Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s of the Rosary constitute “vain repetition” as condemned in the Bible? Well, most Protestants pray the Our Father (Lord’s Prayer) as well as other pre-written prayers (the Psalms, etc.) so the objection can’t be to written prayers per se. Moreover, it seems that what Jesus is condemning in, e.g. Matthew 6:7 is a kind of prayer that seeks to cajole the deity into doing what you want by means of repitition. By contrast, the Rosary is intended to be a prayer wherein one meditates on the Mysteries of Christ’s life. The movement of the fingers and the lips are supposed to help avoid distractions and allow the mind and spirit to enter into a deeper contemplative state. This isn’t to say that the Rosary can’t become a mechanical or self-centered prayer, but so can any other prayer, including the ones we come up with ourselves.

I’m not arguing that Protestants should pray the Rosary. I, for one, never have, and I admit to finding that devotions with a strong Marian element don’t come naturally to me. Nevertheless, it’s a form of prayer that’s nourished countless Christians for hundreds of years (and it predates the Reformation), so I don’t think it should be dismissed out of hand.

Any thoughts?

Jennifer points to a surprisingly good statement on the trinitarian name, particularly as it’s used in Baptism, from the bishops of the ELCA:

The Gospel is at stake in the name of God. “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is the eternal ground for the Church’s evangelical message. God’s revelation takes place in human history. It is this one, true God who was in Jesus, the Christ, reconciling the world to its Creator Lord. In the New Testament, the crucified and risen Jesus is designated by the “Spirit” as the “Son” of the covenant-making God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the same God whom Jesus personally called Abba (“Father”). It is this Triune God alone who sent the Savior to us, became the Savior for us, and inspires faith in the Savior within us.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” is therefore the only doctrinally acceptable way for a person to be baptized into the Body of Christ. The Gospel promises that in Baptism we are graciously united by the Spirit into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, with whom we too may then address God confidently as “our Father.” This view fulfills the apostolic understanding of our risen Lord’s commission for the Church to practice a Trinitarian Baptism in Matthew 28. It is also faithfully reflected in the Trinitarian baptismal formula pronounced by the Church throughout the ages, as presented in the rite for Holy Baptism in the Lutheran Book of Worship.

Consequently, Christians today dare not confuse our proclamation about God and our invocation of God. In speaking about God, the creative use of both masculine and feminine metaphors, analogies, similes, and symbols are highly appropriate and recommended for effective preaching and teaching. Impressive examples already abound in both Scripture and tradition. This intentional practice can also serve well to condemn any alleged Trinitarian sanction for sinful inequality or oppression of women in church and society.

None of these diversified figures of speech, however, may rightly be employed as exchangeable equivalents of God’s name, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Here the Church, in adoration and praise, calls upon the non-sexist name of the three persons of the transsexual Trinity in their own eternal inter-relationships. So, for example, “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier” is not a personal synonym for “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” First, God’s historical activities-creating, redeeming, and sanctifying-are attributed in Scripture to all three persons in the Godhead. Second, God’s indivisible works in history are never confessed to be identical with God’s Trinitarian name in eternity. While others can affirm God as “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier,” only Christ-centered Trinitarians invoke God by name as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

Of course, in practice this is violated all the time. And the phrase “transsexual Trinity,” while technically accurate, seems like an unfortunate choice of words, doesn’t it?

This profile of Sen. Chuck Hagel is notable for the fact that none of the positions ascribed to Hagel (a prudent internationalist in foreign policy, opposed to big government and deficits, opposed to No Child Left Behind, the new Medicare drug benefit, and agricultural subsidies, pro-life, etc.) would have, at least until fairly recently, been thought to be anything but standard conservative fare. But the occasion for this article is that Hagel is a “maverick” and a “dissident” who’s broken with President Bush and much of the rest of the GOP on several of those issues.

Whereas Hagel’s views are pretty much indistinguishable from the conservative mainstream of 5-10 years ago (I recall that he was touted by National Review for having sound foreign policy views back when he was being floated as a possible running mate for George W. Bush in the 2000 election), the conservatism of today has become increasingly polarized into neos and paleos who regard each other with distrust, if not outright scorn and hostility, with apparently little room for the kind of unhypehnated conservatism that Hagel represents.

Salon reports on get tough with Iran noises recently made by 2008 presidential contenders Hilary Clinton and Evan Bayh.

Are we really willing to go to war to prevent Iran from acquiring nukes? I mean, compared to Iran, Iraq actually would look like a cakewalk! Also, I’m unpersuaded by the claim that the crazy ayatollahs wouldn’t be susceptible to traditional deterrence and balance-of-power considerations. After all, Stalin and Mao were not exactly the most stable of fellows, and it worked with them.

Thomas Adams at the blog Without Authority has a couple of good posts on a “modest” natural theology, especially as it interacts with modern science. Natural theology still seems to be largely on the outs in contemporary theology, owing perhaps to the influence Barth still exerts, as well as the recent trend toward seeing theology as a language game or as a discourse whose justification can only be intra-communal or intra-textual.

Interestingly, though, natural theology has made a significant comeback in the last few decades, not only among thinkers working in theology and science like John Polkinghorne (as Thomas discusses), but also among analytic philosophers of religion who have quite successfully challenged the longstanding consensus that between the two of them Hume and Kant had discredited natural theology once and for all.

In his recent book In Defence of Christianity (review here), philosopher and Anglican priest Brian Hebblethwaite contends that arguments for theism arising from phenomena like the existence of rational creatures, the intelligible order of the universe, the existence of moral values, etc., while not providing the foundation of Christian faith, can at least serve as “buttresses” or supports to it. Hebblethwaite concedes that most people’s faith comes from being raised in a religious community or having a powerful conversion experience, but the arguments of natural theology can help show how belief can makes sense of the world as we find it, thus contributing to a “cumulative case” for Christian faith (one that also includes appeals to revelation).

I think some kind of natural theology is probably inevitable, because Christians (and other theists) will always seek to understand how their faith relates to other areas of knowledge. And they will always want to know if there are reasons that can commend the faith to someone who doesn’t already share their commitments (or to the doubting part of their own selves).

Matthew Yglesias has a good response to this Andrew Sullivan post calling for “hard thinking on the left” in the wake of the Danish cartoon brouhaha:

Andrew Sullivan writes, with regard to the cartoon riots:

People keep talking about avoiding conflict. They are in denial. The conflict is already here. It is outrageous to be informed by a crowd of hundreds of thousands that the West must give up its freedoms in order to avoid violence. I’m relieved to see that this moment has forced some very hard thinking on the left. I got an email from a leftist British reader this week, passionately opposed to the foreign policies of Bush and Blair. Now he writes:

The guy says some stuff, but nevermind. I’m not buying. I’m on the left and this is forcing me into no hard thinking whatsoever.

There’s no need for hard thinking precisely because this isn’t a hard question. Of course newspapers should have the legal right to publish cartoons that offend some people. Of course the people offended by the resulting cartoons shouldn’t start throwing around threats of violence to intimidate people. But what does this have to do with “the foreign policies of Bush and Blair” or the need for “very hard thinking” on the left?

I’m not really “on the left” (well, depending on how you define things, but that’s an issue for another post) but this seems exactly right to me. The argument that one either has to side with the “foreign policies of Bush and Blair” or side with those who would crush free speech is only the latest in a long line of false dilemmas that proponents of the “clash of civilizations” view of the war on terrorism have been feeding us for roughly the last five years.

Yglesias concludes:

The problem with the foreign policies of Bush and Blair, by which I take it we mean the Iraq War, is twofold. One, the nature of the threat from the Iraqi regime was neither so large nor so acute as to make invading and occupying Iraq a reasonable method of enhancing American national security. Two, invading, conquering, occupying, and reconstructing medium-sized multi-ethnic polities ruled by long-entrenched dictators is neither an effective method of spreading liberal democracy nor an effective method of achieving humanitarian goals.

So to recap: Killing people or threatening to kill people over cartoons is wrong. Invading Iraq was a bad idea. That’s what I thought before this cartoon mess broke out, and it’s what I still think today. There’s nothing to rethink.

If anything, this issue might force some people into rethinking on some domestic questions. This could involve questions relating to immigration such as whether effective steps are being taken to help immigrants assimilate in a way such that they come to internalize (or at least respect) values like freedom of speech and the press, and how a society balances those values with a commitment to multiculturalism. But the connection between this issue and support for (or opposition to) the Iraq war is hard to see.

Your results:
You are Wonder Woman
You are a beautiful princess
with great strength of character.

Wonder Woman 78%
Green Lantern 70%
Supergirl 68%
Superman 65%
The Flash 65%
Iron Man 65%
Robin 62%
Catwoman 60%
Hulk 50%
Spider-Man 45%
Batman 40%

Click here to take the “Which Superhero are you?” quiz…

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Robin 55% Hulk 55% Iron Man 55% The Flash 50% Catwoman 50% Superman 45% Supergirl 41% Green Lantern 40% Wonder Woman 36% Batman 25%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero am I?” quiz…

Via Siris.

We’re ambivalent about doubt, I think. On the one hand, we admire the person whose faith is so robust that they seem to be able to act with complete trust and confidence. Other the other hand, we tend to be a little bit afraid of the person whose faith is so robust that they seem incapable of entertaining the possibility that they might be mistaken. In the old days (maybe – I wasn’t actually there) we think that doubt was frowned upon in the Church, perhaps a sign of unfaith or an unconfessed sin. These days we’re likely as not to see doubt as a good thing, even an inseparable part of faith. We say that doubt is part of “a mature faith.”

So, what role does or should doubt play in the life of faith? Is doubt something that should ideally diminish over time, something we should strive to get rid of? Or is it a constant companion since we “walk by faith and not by sight,” at least in this life?

Our modern (and post-modern) culture teaches us that every claim to knowledge or belief is suspect. The fact that there are other people who believe differently than we do can all by itself cast doubt over our own convictions. The fragility and contingency of our knowledge, the way our minds are shaped by culture, upbringing, even biology, can undermine trust in our own beliefs.

One can find (at least I do) that sometimes the things you think you believe just don’t seem as plausible as they once did. You suddenly see the once-solid edifice of your beliefs as a rickety structure held together by duct tape and chewing gum. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that he never felt less certain about God’s existence than after he’d just finished defending it with some kind of argument because it made him feel like everything rested on his own puny reason. I’m certainly no C.S. Lewis, so the jury-rigged nature of my own belief-system is even more apparent. Not that there are no good arguments for the truth of Christianity, but those arguments, like the people who make them, are fallible and open to revision. And most of them are inconclusive to say the least.

After all, how much of what we believe is the result of hunches, educated guesses, intuition, or weighting some experiences or pieces of evidence over others, not to mention because that’s what mom and dad/my friends/my super cool professor/Bono believes? Being the incorrigibly social animals that we are, we seem to be highly susceptible to social influences and pressure in forming beliefs.

The trendy post-modern argument that all belief-systems (or “meta-narratives”) are all equally ungrounded is of little comfort here. It’s tantamount to saying “Oh yeah, so’s your old man!” when someone challenges your epistemic credentials. While it might be nice to think that we’re all in the same (leaky) boat, it’s hardly conducive to confidence in one’s own conclusions. We’re faced with what sociologist Peter Berger called “the heretical imperative” – since we no longer see any tradition as simply given and authoritative, we’re forced to choose, knowing that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to offer compelling objective grounds for out choice (this is akin to the existentialists’ notion that we’re “condemned to be free”). Incidentally, appealing to the tradition-boundedness of rationality, as MacIntyre and others do, doesn’t seem to me to help here both because traditions themselves are far from being monolithic and impermeable, especially in the modern world, and it still leaves the question of which tradition one should submit to.

The dilemma here was well put by Kierkegaard: how can faith, which calls for complete (subjective) commitment on our part, be founded on something that is (objectively) uncertain?