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Spare me
I was pretty sure I didn’t want to see Borat, but this clinches it for me. Low-brow humor I can take, but pretentious and self-righterous low-brow humor – no thanks. Anyway, America has got to be among the least anti-Semitic countries in the world by any standard I can think of. I did watch a…
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How to get out of Iraq?
A proposal from Sen. Russ Feingold. (via ACBfP) Even though I was unsupportive of the original decision to go to war, I’ve only grudgingly been swayed toward the cut-and-run option. But more and more it seems to me that the longer we stay the more likely we’ll end up backing one side or the other…
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More thoughts on Chadwick’s The Early Church
John Henry Newman once said that “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” Now, I’m certainly not going to claim to be “deep” into early church history after having read Chadwick’s The Early Church (along with a few other books along the way), but I think I can see what Newman…
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Eyewitnesses to Jesus
Great interview with British NT scholar and theologian Richard Bauckham at the blog Chrisendom discussing Bauckham’s new book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. The book, in a nutshell: The historical argument (most of the book) is that the eyewitnesses of the events of the Gospel history remained, throughout their lives, the authoritative sources and guarantors of…
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Conservatism – wha’ happened?
Former National Review board member and trustee Austin Bramwell writes about what he sees as the dead end of conservatism. No one is spared – neither neocons nor paleocons – but Bramwell reserves his harshest criticisms for NR, the flagship journal of American conservatism, for becoming, in his view, unserious about, well, pretty much everything.…
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Orthodoxy/Orthopraxis
Graham at Leaving Muenster has a characteristically challenging post on where Christianity falls short if it’s taken to be simply a set of beliefs and not a way of life: I remember hearing Brian Mclaren talk a few years ago about an interview he’d given at a conference. I believe it was with Dallas Willard…
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The politics of biotech
William Saletan has a good article on how biotech issues are threatening to upset existing political categories. He gives an admirably evenhanded account of the stakes as each side sees them, but then points out that these debates are making for strange bedfellows: On the left, the instinct is to treat ESC research like health…
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The more things change… or Lessons from the early church
I’ve been reading Henry Chadwick’s history of the early church (thanks, Josh!) and been struck by the relevance of that history for some of the issues facing the church today. Consider, for example, the so-called new atheists (Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al.) who specialize in arguing against a certain construal of Christianity as though it…
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Feingold’s out
Looks like Russ Feingold has ruled out an 08 presidential run to focus on influencing the Democratic agenda in the Senate. This is too bad in my view, not because I expected him to actually get the nomination (much less win the general election), but that I think it would be useful to have an…
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Black helicopter watch
I read the NT Wright lecture I linked to yesterday and I tend to agree with Jonathan that Wright is too optimistic about a global army (or “police force” as he calls it) as a viable alternative to our present situation. Wright says: First, we must work from every angle either to enable the United…
