-
A Marxist defends God
Terry Eagleton lays the smack down on Richard Dawkins (via Brandon). The influence of Herbert McCabe, O.P., one of Eagleton’s friends and mentors, really comes through here. In his book After Theory, Eagleton even argues for a kind of Thomistic Aristotelianism as a philosophical foundation for left-wing politics and an alternative to postmodernist nihilism (See…
-
Evangelical reading list
Christianity Today has published a list of the Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals. I’ve only read three of the titles on the list, and they’re all by non-evangelicals (C.S. Lewis, Bonhoeffer, Philip Jenkins) which I guess shouldn’t be too surprising. Given what appears to be the – ahem – uneven quality of some…
-
Some politics are local
A friend sends along this E.J. Dionne column on the Massachusetts governor race from the Washington Post. Dionne is correct that Mitt Romney’s would-be heir, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healy has ditched her boss’s socially conservative positions on abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage. Instead, she’s running as a law-and-order fiscal conservative in contrast to the…
-
Kauffmania
The blog 2 Blowhards has been running a series of interviews with “reactionary radical” Bill Kauffman this week (see here, here, here, here, and here). Makes for interesting reading, full of Kauffman’s trademark excoriation of globalization, rootless politicians, imperial wars, and anonymous corporations, as well as his love of small towns, baseball, and Dorothy Day.…
-
"Christian" politics
I was flipping through my copy of C.S. Lewis’s God in the Dock last night after being referred to his essay on vivisection by the Andrew Linzey article I blogged about yesterday. But I also read his very interesting essay “Meditation on the Third Commandment,” which deals specifically with the role of Christians in politics.…
-
C.S. Lewis’s theology of animals
I found this article by Andrew Linzey while searching for something yesterday. Good stuff. I reviewed Linzey’s Animal Theology here.
-
Blue-state blues
For one thing, your vote no longer matters. Meanwhile, here in Massachusetts, I was amused to see the Republican candidate for governor go out of her way to assure the voters that her positions on abortion and stem-cell research are indistinguishable from her Democratic opponent. Massachusetts: where even the Republicans are Democrats!
-
Is our atheists learning?
Thomas wonders why high profile atheist provocateurs like Richard Dawkins seem to know so little about the religions they criticize and frequently traffic in straw-man arguments. He also excerpts a take down of Dawkins’ latest book by agnostic Thomas Nagel.* Scientific popularizers like Dawkins often seem to think that their expertise in one field translates…
-
Damn statistics
Speaking of war and death and other cheery topics, here’s a helpful analysis of the results of the recent Lancet study on the mortality rate in post-invasion Iraq (via Confessing Evangelical).
-
Double effect double standard
This post by the Bull Moose blogger (via Marvin) brings to mind a point made by Robert Holmes in his excellent On War and Morality (I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may not get all the details right). Pacifists and anti-interventionists are often criticized for their unwillingness to take up…
