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…

First, Jacob Weisberg argues that we don’t really need a major overhaul of immigration policy, and that the proposals currently on the table will likely make things worse. Second, Fareed Zakaria says that a permanent class of guest-workers without a path to citizenship is a bad idea, and un-American to boot.

Radley Balko writes at Slate on the troubling increase in the use of “no-knock” raids by police: In the 1995 case Wilson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court for the first time ruled that at least in principle, the Fourth Amendment requires police to knock and announce themselves before entering a private home. In doing so,…

When the Spaniards threw out their conservative government after the March 2004 bombings in Madrid and replaced it with a left-of-center one that was promising, among other things, to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, they were roundly denounced by U.S. hawks as “appeasers” (for some American pundits it’s always Munich in 1938). Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias…

This story is a bit sketchy about the actual content of a recently published translation of the so-called Gospel of Judas. The document was discovered by looters in the ’70s, but was just released yesterday by the National Geographic Society after having been authenticated. Previously it seems that it was only known through St. Irenaeus’…

Pastor Clint Schnekloth of the blog Lutheran Confessions has a good article in the Journal of Lutheran Ethics on a Christian ethic of eating. He discusses issues like justice and equity for those who raise and process our food, the ethics of enjoying and sharing our food as a gift, and vegetarianism as an option…