I suspect many Christians who blog might see themselves as doing the sort of thing that 1 Peter advises: Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. However, the very next sentence may bring us up a bit short: But do…

Any article that begins with this awesome story is worth reading: Thomas Jefferson stood, dressed in a black suit, in a doorway of the White House on Jan. 1, 1802, watching a bizarre spectacle. Two horses were pulling a dray carrying a 1,235-pound cheese—just for him. Measuring 4 feet in diameter and 17 inches in…

Catholic Encyclopedia entry. History of St. Patrick and his day. St. Patrick: Just the Facts (at Slate) St. Patrick’s “breastplate”: I bind to myself today The strong virtue of the Invocation of the Trinity: I believe the Trinity in the Unity The Creator of the Universe. I bind to myself today The virtue of the…

Brendan O’Neill wonders why Western pundits seem to think the mess in the Balkans was all about us.

The Internet Monk has a post on being an eccentric reader that I completely identify with (except that I can’t claim my reading has been so consistenlty Christ-focused). When I was an undergrad (and a grad student for that matter) I spent more time than I probably should’ve reading things that were only tangentially related…

Christian Century reviews Miroslav Volf’s new book Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace and likes it a lot. I just picked up a copy the other day and am looking forward to digging in (I thought his Exclusion and Embrace was really excellent). It also carries a foreword from…

The blog Fides Quaerens Intellectum has an intriguing discussion of an argument for an early dating of the documents of the New Testament found in John A.T. Robinson’s book Redating the New Testament. Interestingly the liberal Robinson, who was sort of the Bishop Spong of his day,* came to the conclusion that all the books…

It’s not uncommon to hear social critics complain about Americans’ “increased geographic mobility” as a cause of our supposedly ever-increasing social atomism. Frequent moves break up families and communities, leaving a nation of footloose individualists in its wake. The problem, according to an article in the April issue of Reason (not yet online, alas) by…

The late philosopher Robert Nozick is probably best known for his book Anarchy, State and Utopia, a defense of the libertarian minimal state and an influential critique of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. But, as Gene Healy reminds us, A,S&U contains a brief but substantial discussion of moral constraints on our treatment of animals.…

Eric links to this interesting article by two theologians in the International Herald Tribune which argues that, rhetoric notwithstanding, the (in their view, unrelievedly bad) policies of Bush and Blair are motivated by secular ideology, not Christianity. Far be it from me, as anyone who reads this blog knows, to defend the recent foreign policy…