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American V: A Hundred Highways, the posthumous Johnny Cash album coming out on Tuesday is being streamed here (via Unqualified Offerings). Also, attentive readers may have noticed that occasional contributor (and I do mean occasional) Abby has been removed from the sidebar. As a newly minted federal employee she is supposed to refrain from appearing Read more

Slate Magazine has been running some interesting articles on religion and politics this week. On Monday Martin Edlund wrote about tensions on the religious left, contrasting the eccentric spiritual progressivism of Rabbi Michael Lerner witht the more moderate evangelicalism of Jim Wallis. On Tuesday Russell Cobb reviewed Michelle Goldberg’s tract on impending theocracy in America Read more

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees. The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and international Geneva conventions. Read Read more

MSNBC has a version of the test administered to people seeking to become American citizens (via Bill Keezer). I got a 95% – stupid seventh amendment! But apparently I still “know more about this great land than most Americans.” Read more

Here’s a transcript from a recent episode of NPR’s “Speaking of Faith” – a good discussion with Rabbi Elliot Dorff and NT scholar Luke Timothy Johnson about marriage and sexuality. Johnson emphasizes the conflicted evaluation the NT gives to marriage and family and how that doesn’t exactly mesh with some of the “family values” rhetoric Read more

Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, which I have touted repeatedly in these august pages, reviews Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. Beinart, an erstwhile New Republic editor, argues for the resuscitation of muscular Cold War Read more

Today’s the Western feast day of St. Irenaeus (c. 125-202 A.D.), bishop of Lyons, church father, and scourge of gnosticism. Irenaeus, according to tradition, was merely two degrees removed from the apostles themselves, having heard the preaching of St. Polycarp who himself had sat at the feet of St. John. [I]t was for this end Read more

A good piece by Cato Institute scholars Justin Logan and Chritopher Preble criticizing a recent Jonah Goldberg commendation of nation building as the way to win the war on terrorism at National Review Online of all places. Kudos to them for publishing a piece that basically contradicts their editorial line on the war. We even Read more

This column is a near-perfect example of what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism.” Read more

That’s the title of a forthcoming book which compiles evidence of the role of military physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel in the kinds of “interrogation techniques” being used at Guantanamo Bay and detention centers in Afghanistan (and elsewhere for all we know) such as: Beating; punching with fists; use of truncheons; kicking; slamming against Read more