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Slow food Nation
The current issue of The Nation magazine is dedicated to “food issues” – farming practices, consumption habits, environmental concerns, etc. Contributors include Wendell Berry, Peter Singer, and Eric Schlosser among others. A good portion of it is available online.
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Links of note
Steven Riddle at Flos Carmeli is discussing Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons, here, here, and here. Camassia on Christians and political protest, here and here. In the American Conservative symposium on “right and left” that I mentioned recently, onservative writer Heather Mac Donald took issue with the allegedly widespread assumption that one has to be religious…
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Pascal’s Fire 6: The contingent cosmos
Previously we saw that a major difference between a strictly scientific or naturalistic worldview and a supernaturalistic or theistic one is whether or not personal existence is taken to be a derivative and ultimately reducible facet of non-personal existence. Another way of putting it might be to ask which is a more fundamental form of…
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Follow-up on creation, natural evil, etc.
Just wanted to call your attention to some of the excellent comments on these two posts. I haven’t had time to respond to all of them, but I’m really glad to get comments of such caliber here. (Of course, the post on booze has generated more comments than either of them.) Also, see this discussion…
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Pascal’s Fire 5: The priority of the personal
In part one of Pascal’s Fire Keith Ward emphasized the ways in which the best contemporary science is consistent with, and maybe even suggestive of, belief in God. In part two he goes one step further to look at the ways in which science falls short of offering an exhaustive description and explanation of reality.…
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New JoC
One of the benefits of being a snotty atheist as a teenager was that I had very little exposure to the world of Contemporary Christian Music. I couldn’t help but feel bad for a Christian friend of mine who listened almost exclusively to bad Christian knock-offs of secular bands. Although my older sister, who is…
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Drink like a grown up!
I realize this has been going on for some time, but I just want to go on record in opposition to all forms of the flavored martini. I was at a restaurant this weekend that offered a chocolate chip martini for the love of Pete! Hey do you want a bowl of Cap’n Crunch with…
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Hart on natural evil and the broken cosmos
David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea is, in large part, a sharp rejoinder to any “theodicy” that would seek to make evil – physical, natural, or moral – a necessary means to the acheivement of some good. As such, it provides a useful counterpoint to the kind of account offered by Keith Ward.…
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Tiber swimming
This article from the Christian Century discusses the journeys of six prominent theologians – three Lutherans, two Anglicans, and a Mennonite – to Rome. The reasons generally seem to be an attraction to Catholic ecclesiology and/or the worry that mainline Protestantism is incapable of embodying a genuinely orthodox and catholic Christianity. I wonder if there’s…
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Feast of the Assumption of the BVM/Feast of Mary, Mother of Our Lord
Today marks the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in the traditional Catholic reckoning. The ELCA observes it simply as the festival of Mary, Mother of Our Lord, while the Episcopal Church has it as St. Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord. The Orthodox Church, meanwhile, celebrates the Dormition (“falling asleep”) of Our Most Holy…
