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Nice slideshow at Slate arguing that Fra Angelico was a pivotal figure between stylized medieval art and the more naturalisitic individualized style of the Renaissance. Worth clicking over just to see the paintings.

Advent is the season when we await the Lord’s coming. The coming of the babe in the manger, his coming into our lives at every moment, especially through his word and sacrament, and his coming at the end of the age with the saints and angels in glory. In that spirit, Advent may be a good time for us to commit (or re-commit!) ourselves to spiritual disciplines that can create a space where we can wait upon the Lord.

The obvious ones are prayer, fasting, scripture reading and almsgiving, and of course regular attendance at worship and reception of the sacrament. I have used (sporadically) a version of the Daily Office published by a group of Anglican Franciscans whose cycle of daily prayer changes depending on the season (most versions of the office follow a similar pattern). The canticles, collects, scripture readings, etc. are chosen to reflect the themes of the season.

Learning some of the church’s great Advent hymns might also be a good idea. This year I’m hoping to spend some time dipping into the poetry of George Herbert. Some people suggest keeping an Advent wreath in the home, or the always-popular Advent calendar.

As a season of patient waiting and expectation Advent seems like the ideal counterweight to the frenzy of consumerism and anxiety that so many people in the prosperous west experience as the “holiday season.”

Thanks to Siel (the “green LA girl”) for stopping by and offering some informative links on the fair trade coffee issue. I found this overview (PDF) from Oxfam particularly helpful.

Commenters raised some good points. First, even if “in the long run” fair trade doesn’t raise prices for farmers, it’s offering concrete help to people now. Secondly, fair trade co-ops offer farmers ways to circumvent middlemen and exporters, helping to break the virtual monopoly enjoyed by a handful of companies, as well as giving them access to market information and credit at non-extortionate rates.

Movie reviews from Slate, The Onion, and The NY Times.

Christianity Today interviews Reese Witherspoon, Joaquin Phoenix and director James Mangold.

Official site for the movie.

MORE: Frederica Mathewes-Green and Steve Beard at National Review Online.

Rep. John Murtha, a hawkish conservative Democrat has called for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq following the vote on the constitution next month. Murtha represents Pennsylvania’s 12th congressional district in the southwestern part of the state, and as someone who grew up not far from there, I can assure you that this is a bastion of socially conservative, blue-collar, pro-military “values voters” (think “Reagan Democrats”). If the Bush administration’s Iraq policy is losing these folks, it’s not clear who’s going to support it (apart from a handful of pundits and bloggers).

As the Inquirer puts it:

Murtha’s 30-year voting record matches his lunch-pail constituency: He supported the Reagan administration’s Central America policy, opposed gun controls, and favored display of the Ten Commandments.

And Murtha is no flaky fringe figure, but a well-respected military expert and ex-Marine who served in Vietnam.

In staking out such a strong stance, the steel-country centrist from Western Pennsylvania gave Democrats a sober, pro-military voice to argue the case against the war. Murtha sided with his party’s liberal wing, not with Democrats who want a phased pullout or want Bush to set a departure timetable.

You can read the text of Rep. Murtha’s speech on the war here.

Church-related organizations like Lutheran World Relief have really jumped on the “fair trade coffee” bandwagon. I sometimes, but not always, buy fair trade coffee and have never been able to make up my mind whether it actually does any good.

This article (via Byzantine Calvinist) argues that it doesn’t:

In fact, in this type of low-entry barrier market, a program like fair trade coffee can’t effectively raise the well-being of third world coffee growers by paying them more. Doing so would raise the returns to coffee production relative to other activities and would induce more farmers to produce coffee. This would expand the supply until the price farmers receive dropped back to the subsistence level. The only way to prevent that from happening is to prevent farmers around the world from entering the market or producing more, or to limit who receives fair-trade prices. These tactics, by arbitrarily selecting beneficiaries, really would be unjust.

Who’s right here? And how does the average consumer tell? And do our individual purchasing decisions make a difference, or is that just moral narcissism?

It’s interesting that in some theological circles epistemology has become such a hot topic, especially considering I’ve always found epistemology to be one of the least exciting branches of philosophy. Much of the controversy seems to revolve around attacking or defending “foundationalism.” Foundationalism is the view, often associated with Descartes, that all our knowledge rests ultimately on certain “foundational” beliefs.

The Cartesian version takes those foundational beliefs to be certain in the sense of not being open to doubt, but it’s important to note that not all versions of foundationalism are committed to that. It’s perfectly possible to think that some of our beliefs are more fundamental than others (in fact, I’d say it’s probably impossible not to think that to some degree) but that even the more basic beliefs are fallible. For instance, many of my beliefs rest, at least in part, on my sense-perception of the world, but it’s quite possible for me to coherently doubt whether my sense-perceptions accurately represent the world. It’s just that perhaps I don’t have anything more basic to go on.

So the common dichotomy you see between people who supposedly believe in “absolute certainty” and those who don’t isn’t necessarily a matter of foundationalism vs. non-foundationalism. Once that’s clear I’m not sure how much of a stake theology has in that particular debate (though I do think theology has a stake in realist vs. non-realist epistemologies).

At Reason Nick Gillespie writes appreciatively of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, and sees him as a model for religious liberty and secular government that is still applicable today.

While it’s true that the baptist Williams believed that it was wrong – for impeccably theological reasons – for government to try to coerce belief, he did think that civil government should enforce the “second tablet” of the Decalogue. But this would hardly sit well with Reason-type libertarians and other secularists!

It seems to me that the limits of applying Williams’ vision to our time arise because he, like virtually all pre-modern Christian thinkers, identified the Decalogue with the natural moral law that was accessible to all people without need of special revelation.

But nowadays it’s fashionable to think that moralities are irreducibly particular and are outgrowths of specific traditions, rather than being common to all reasonable people. The problem with this is that, in a pluralistic society such as our own, it’s not clear what, if any, common morality that leaves us. And “separation of church and state” doesn’t settle it because, if there is no universal morality then we still have to decide which morality will hold sway in the public sphere. And, according to this view, all morality is “religious” in the sense that it belongs to a particular tradition.

In his book on Spiritual Theology, Diogenes Allen considers whehter spiritual disciplines aimed at growing in love of God and neighbor are a form of “works righteousness,” a concern that Protestants often have:

Many Christians are uneasy with the idea that we are to make an effort to overcome our inadequacies because it sounds like “works righteousness,” as if our salvation depended on something we do rather than wholly on God’s grace. But we must remember that God is as fully active and present in our lives when we are making an effort as when we are not. I both instances we rely wholly on God for our existence and powers. It also helps to remember the distinction between justification and sanctification. As the great Protestant reformer John Calvin put it, justification and sanctification are twins. They are both the work of Christ, but each is a distinct work. Justification is our forgiveness or pardon by God apart from the law because of Christ’s death on the cross; sanctification is the process by which we actually begin to become holy, free of the effects of evil and full of charity or divine love. Justification is the beginning of sanctification. Both require divine grace. Divine grace does not mean that there is nothing left for us to do. Quite the contrary, it is precisely because of divine grace that we are able to begin to seek freedom from the effects of sin and evil, and to begin to love in the way Christ loves. (p. 9)

Even Luther, arch-foe of works-righteousness that he was, could write of the necessity of discipline for the Christian life. From The Freedom of a Christian:

Although, as I have said, inwardly, and according to the spirit, a man is amply enough justified by faith having all that he requires to have, except that this very faith and abundance ought to increase from day to day even till the future life, still he remains in this mortal life upon earth, in which it is necessary that he should rule his own body and have intercourse with men. Here then works begin; here he must not take his ease; he must give heed to exercise his body by fastings, watchings, labour, and other regular discipline, so that it may be subdued to the spirit, and obey and conform itself to the inner man and faith, and not rebel against them nor hinder them, as is its nature to do if it is kept under. For the inner man, being conformed to God and created after the image of God through faith, rejoices and delights itself in Christ, in whom such blessing have been conferred on it, and hence has only this task before it: to serve God with joy and for nought in free love.

I think the key distinction here is that, according to the Reformers, we are justified (forgiven, pardoned, etc.) solely on account of Christ and there’s nothing we do to merit salvation in any respect. What they objected to was any suggestion that God accepts us based on some intrinsic quality we posses, even if it is supposed to be wrought by grace (what Robert Jenson called the “anti-Pelagian codicil”).

But, as a consequence of our justification we receive the Holy Spirit who works within us to transform us into the image of the Son of God. But it’s not in virtue of that “actualized” holiness that God accepts us, but only on account of Christ. You might say that sanctification is the working out or making visible of our salvation as we are conformed to Christ’s image, but it’s not the cause of it.

A while back I was reading an article about the flat tax and all the benefits it could bring in terms of simplifying the tax code. But, as far as I could tell, you could get all the same simplicity benefits from a simplified graduated rate. My wife, who is smarter than me and has taken a class on tax law, confirmed this breakfast-table analysis.

Anyway, here’s someone making basically the same point, except with knowledge and facts and whatnot.