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,…

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…