O come and mourn with me awhile;And tarry here the cross beside;O come, together let us mourn;Jesus, our Lord, is crucified. Have we no tears to shed for Him,While soldiers scoff and foes deride?Ah! look how patiently He hangs;Jesus, our Lord, is crucified. How fast His hands and feet are nailed;His blessed tongue with thirst…

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, venerable anti-war and civil rights activist, passed away yesterday. Here’s a profile from PBS’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.

This article by Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive estimates the human cost of using “merely” a tactical, “bunker buster” nuke on Iran. Terrifying stuff. (via Conservative Green)

Matthew Yglesias has a good article on what’s wrong with the concept of “guest worker” programs: The details of these proposals vary quite a bit and, as ever, the details are important. But all varieties of the concept share some factors in common. Unlike regular immigrants, guest workers are only allowed into their host country…

It’s hard to know how seriously to take all the claims in this Seymour Hersh article on the Bush administration’s approach to Iran given all the unnamed sources. But the suggestion that the use of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites is even being considered is scary. P.S. This Slate article attempts to…

I’m anti-war, but I’m pro-troop. The soldiers are good boys and girls doing what they’re told. It’s not their war — they’re just fighting it. I don’t have a beef with them. It’s Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney I have questions for. But a guy in the army? A twenty-one-year-old kid from…

I recently read an article by philosopher Andrew Fiala called “Citizenship, Epistemology, and the Just War Theory”* which attempts to flesh out an argument for what he calls “pacifism in practice.” Fiala says that those who are committed to the just war tradition should, for all intents and purposes, be “antiwar pacifists”** due to the…

Interesting piece by Garry Wills on attempts from Right and Left to turn Jesus into a political mascot: The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are,…

The lack of sophistication in the reporting on the Gospel of Judas has been nothing short of astounding. For instance, in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer there is an inane story asking the proverbial man (and woman) in the pew how the “news” that Judas may not have betrayed Jesus after will affect their faith. Most of…

Good article in The American Conservative by Christopher Layne, a professor of international relations at Texas A&M, on Iran. He argues that, one, it’s far from clear how close Iran is to having nukes, two, it’s far from clear that we could actually prevent them from getting them with airstrikes, three, any kind of military…