MSNBC has a version of the test administered to people seeking to become American citizens (via Bill Keezer). I got a 95% – stupid seventh amendment! But apparently I still “know more about this great land than most Americans.”

Here’s a transcript from a recent episode of NPR’s “Speaking of Faith” – a good discussion with Rabbi Elliot Dorff and NT scholar Luke Timothy Johnson about marriage and sexuality. Johnson emphasizes the conflicted evaluation the NT gives to marriage and family and how that doesn’t exactly mesh with some of the “family values” rhetoric…

Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, which I have touted repeatedly in these august pages, reviews Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. Beinart, an erstwhile New Republic editor, argues for the resuscitation of muscular Cold War…

Today’s the Western feast day of St. Irenaeus (c. 125-202 A.D.), bishop of Lyons, church father, and scourge of gnosticism. Irenaeus, according to tradition, was merely two degrees removed from the apostles themselves, having heard the preaching of St. Polycarp who himself had sat at the feet of St. John. [I]t was for this end…

A good piece by Cato Institute scholars Justin Logan and Chritopher Preble criticizing a recent Jonah Goldberg commendation of nation building as the way to win the war on terrorism at National Review Online of all places. Kudos to them for publishing a piece that basically contradicts their editorial line on the war. We even…

This column is a near-perfect example of what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism.”

That’s the title of a forthcoming book which compiles evidence of the role of military physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel in the kinds of “interrogation techniques” being used at Guantanamo Bay and detention centers in Afghanistan (and elsewhere for all we know) such as: Beating; punching with fists; use of truncheons; kicking; slamming against…

Recently Camassia posted on how children’s stories can inculcate a sentimental view of animals and the natural world that is neither realistic nor truly compassionate. This led to a discussion about in what sense death and predation in the natural world are an essential part of the created order and what our attitude toward them…

(See here and here for previous posts.) Next to Anselm’s, Peter Abelard’s atonement theory may be the most criticized in Christian history, though usually by different people. Beginning with his contemporary Bernard of Clairvaux and continuing to evangelicals in our own day who uphold the indispensibility of satisfaction or penal substitution atonement models, Abelard’s theory…

Hey, we found WMD in Iraq! Oh wait, not really. This may put me on the fringe (if I wasn’t there already), but I always thought the WMD business was a red herring in the first place. I recall reading an article Gregg Easterbrook wrote back in 2002 – in The New Republic of all…