We had a wonderful time, visiting Rome for four days and Florence for three. Lots of walking around gaping at magnificent Roman architecture, marvelling at Renaissance and Medieval masterpieces, peering into Baroque churches, enjoying the beautiful Italian weather, and consuming a lot of pasta and red wine (if red wine is really good for your…

Blogging will be more-or-less nonexistent over the next week or so as the missus and I are headed off to Italy! I’m very excited, never having made it to continental Europe before now. Almost as exciting is the fact that I’ll miss the inevitable blog-mania surrounding the release of the Da Vinci Code movie. I…

That’s one description of Bill Kauffman’s just-released Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists. Based on what I’ve seen, it continues the project Kauffman started in his earlier America First! of tracing a counter-tradition of American politics that dissents from the bipartisan consensus on the mega-state, corporate capitalism, and global interventionism.…

I used to really love the Red Hot Chili Peppers. At one time I would’ve put them among my top three favorite bands. Unfortunately, ever since the disastrous One Hot Minute – disastrous despite the promising addition of former Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro – they’ve pretty much been going downhill into middle-of-the-road, radio-friendly “alterna”…

I’m glad Chris Daughtry got voted off American Idol last night. He’s a decent singer, but he turns everything he sings into some kind of bland late-90s “alternative” rock. (And I still haven’t forgiven him for his unutterably bad rendition of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line.” *shudder*) Personally, I’ve been rooting for Elliott for…

I’ve never really given much thought to the medieval debate between Franciscans and Dominicans about whether the Incarnation would’ve taken place if humankind hadn’t sinned. I guess it always struck me as a classically “scholastic” debate (in the pejorative sense). But now I’m not so sure. It seems that which position one takes could have…

From USA Today: The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY. The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the…

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the Generous Orthodoxy/Thinktank site about whether the so-called Emerging Church “conversation” or “movement” or whatever it is should have some kind of formal creed or doctrinal statement. Now, all I know about the Emerging Church stuff is what I’ve read and I can’t say that much of…

I just finished reading Andrew Linzey’s Animal Theology. Linzey, a Church of England priest and theologian is also a long-time animal rights activist. His book presents a strong challenge to Christians who think of animal rights as a concern confined to the likes of PETA and Peter Singer, and who see concern for animals as…

Jonathan Norman at the blog The Phaith of St. Phransus posted a series of links to a very good radio interview with Stanley Hauerwas, focusing mainly on pacifism/non-violence as a normative stance for Christians. As always with Hauerwas, I find myself agreeing with a lot of what he says, and disagreeing some. In particular think…