VI gadfly and all-around swell guy Josh has a great post about the past and future of those who call themselves liberals or progressives. The pope and Lenin both make an appearance, so you won’t want to miss it.

A rich self has a distinct attitude toward the past, the present, and the future. It surveys the past with gratitude for what it has received, not with annoyance about what it hasn’t achieved or about how little it has been given. A rich self lives in the present with contentment. Rather than never having…

One of the things I’ve noticed in writing this blog is that I have a tendency to worry about seeming inconsistent or failing to present a coherent perspective on the topics I write about. This is ironic because one of my reasons for starting the blog was as a way of thinking aloud about things…

This bit from a news account of a speech President Bush gave yesterday in Ohio on the state of the Iraq war made me chuckle: One woman asked Bush if the war in Iraq and rise in terror were “signs of the Apocalypse.” “Hmmm,” Bush replied. “I haven’t really thought of it that way. ……

Slate has an article on the “dark side” of Whole Foods and an insider’s guide to Trader Joe’s for New Yorkers who are apparently about to get their first store (can it really be that Philly is ahead of the curve for once?). The article on Whole Foods makes the point that buying organic and…

Religious Affiliations of Comic Book Characters (via Noli Irritare Leones). All we Lutherans got is Jimmy Olsen. Bah.

Afghan may die for conversion to ChristiantyKABUL, Afghanistan – An Afghan man is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death for converting from Islam to Christianity, a crime under this country’s Islamic laws, a judge said yesterday. The trial highlights a struggle between religious conservatives and reformists over what shape…

At Right Reason, philosopher Edward Feser argues, contra paleoconservative critics, that the Iraq war was “at the very least defensible from the point of view of traditional just war theory” (here and here with a third post to come, I think). I haven’t had a chance to read through Prof. Feser’s argument, but it appears…

Here’s a really nifty article by Reformed thinker Calvin Seerveld on “How to Read the Bible Like a Grown-Up Child” (via Gideon Strauss): It’s not easy to read the Bible. It’s easier to read it wrong or not to read it at all. To read the Bible the way it is written takes some coaching…

I’ve sometimes described my political outlook as “chastened liberalism”, or, more grandiosely, “Augustinian liberalism.” Imagine my interest, then, when I came across these couple of articles: A Christian Argument for Political Self-Restraint Augustine and the Case for Limited Government [PDF] Probably the secular thinker who’s influenced me the most in this area is F.A. Hayek,…