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MySpace
A recent conversation with a longtime friend of mine: Longtime friend: “You should get a MySpace account. It’s a great way to find people you’ve lost touch with.” Me: “I had good reasons for burning those bridges.”
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We’re all liberals now(?)
This helpful post at Connexions argues that “liberal theology” should be seen more as a method or approach to theology than a set of substantive conclusions. In other words, there’s nothing about liberal theology per se that prevents one from, say, believing in the resurrection or the virgin birth or what have you. What’s distinctive…
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Pope notes
A round up of Muslim bloggers’ responses to Pope Benedict’s speech (via Fr. Jim Tucker). The pope’s address is well worth reading quite apart from the ensuing brouhaha. Of particular interest to me is his association of a voluntarist view of the divine nature and various programs of “de-Hellenization” with certain forms of Protestantism. Luther…
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NRCAT message on S. 3861
I received this message from the National Religious Coalition Against Torture identifying certain Republican senators who might be persuaded to support Sen. McCain in opposing the White House’s Military Commissions Act of 2006 which, among other things, would authorize “secret CIA interrogation facilities around the world that have permission to use an ‘alternative set of…
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The church of the future?
Here’s an interesting piece about the community that has grown out of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. While it has some of the heavy breathing about conservative Christians you’d expect to find at Salon (“Within this movement lies something as old as America itself, and as terrifying and alluring as anything Orwell predicted”), the author…
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"String conjecture"?
Thomas at Without Authority, himself an honest-to-goodness scientist, points us to this article from Gregg Easterbrook about a new book arguing that string theory isn’t really science, but something more like metaphysical speculation. I’d be the last one to claim anything more than a layman’s knowledge of current physics (at best), but it has always…
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Theocons or liberals?
I’m reminded by this post from prolific Orthodox blogger Daniel Larison that there are those who not only don’t regard the First Things crowd as theocrats, but who actually regard them as fatally compromised and sold out to secular Enlightenment liberalism. In addition to traditionalists like Mr. Larison there are folks like Stanley Hauerwas who…
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Chill out, liberals
We’ve seen conservative critiques of the recent raft of books warning of an imminent theocracy, but it’s nice to see liberals trying to interject some sanity into the debate. Peter Steinfels and Paul Baumann (both political liberals affiliated with Commonweal magazine, I believe) throw cold water on some of the more alarmist books to come…
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How (un)safe are we?
I didn’t want to write anything about the 9/11 anniversary yesterday because a lot of what I read was simply an exercise in flogging the author’s politics. So, instead, I’m going to flog my politics today! Okay, not really, but I did think this article at the Cato Institute by political scientist John Mueller was…
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The season of our bloggers’ discontent
Maybe it’s an end of summer thing, but some of my favorite bloggers are calling it quits, or seriously considering doing so: Jack at Cantanima, Jennifer at Scandal of Particularity, and Caleb at Mode for Caleb. We can only admire them for their commitment to the more important things in life, while nevertheless hoping they…
