There’s been quite a bit of discussion about appropriate church attire among the blogs I read (see here, here and here) stemming from a pastoral letter from a Catholic bishop in Texas urging modest dress in church (though most of the disputants in the above linked posts are not Catholic). Personally, I’ve learned through long…

I’ve made no secret of my disgruntlement with many aspects of the Bush administration’s policy (foreign and domestic), but it seems to me that I should praise the President when he does something I agree with. At the risk of seeming too positive, I can think of about a half-dozen occasions before this off the…

Catholic law professor Stephen Bainbridge has more on just war and proportionality. Prof. Bainbridge is making a slightly different point than the one I was trying to get at. He’s more concerned about how the targeting of civilian infrastructure violates the criterion of proportionality. I was assuming, for the sake of argument, a case where…

Matthew Yglesias has a really good article at the American Prospect on what he calls the “Green Lantern” theory of politics. This is the idea that the only thing standing between us and achieving our objectives is a lack of will power. Just like Green Lantern’s power ring can do pretty much anything if the…

Tim Cavanaugh tries to puzzle it out. I’m as clueless about this situation as everyone else. Despite the sight of many bloggers, pundits, etc. treating us to their iron-clad certainty over the past week. P.S. Fred Kaplan has a helpful article up at Slate.

Today he starts off by laying into Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and goes on to tear the guys at the Weekly Standard a new one: The administration, justly criticized for its Iraq premises and their execution, is suddenly receiving some criticism so untethered from reality as to defy caricature. The national, ethnic and religious…

The debate about the justness of Israel’s response to recent attacks by Hezbollah highlights what is, to me, one of the most difficult to understand aspects of Just-War Theory, namely, the criterion of “proportionality.” Proportionality has taken on increased importance in the last centruy or so because of the nature of modern warfare, but that…

This essay by Randall Balmer, adapted from his new book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical’s Lament (can we get a subtitle check here?) is sharply critical of the Religious Right, but can’t seem to make up its mind on whether it wants the Right to…

Though my dear wife is still convalescing, I managed to pop off yesterday morning for an early “said mass” at the Church of the Advent in Boston. The service followed, more or less, the order for Holy Communion from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, with which I’m not terribly familiar. I was struck, in…

In a story in yesterday’s Boston Globe on congressional moves to overturn President Bush’s embryonic stem-cell research policy Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, is quoted as saying that ESCR is “unethical and ineffective”: “The results speak for themselves,” he said. “Embryonic stem-cell research has produced no successful treatment for human beings, whereas…