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…

From today’s Philadelphia Inquirer: ROME – The sudden recovery of a young French nun suffering from Parkinson’s disease is at the heart of the sainthood case for Pope John Paul II, the Polish priest who heads the inquiry said yesterday. The Vatican needs to confirm a miracle after John Paul’s death for the pontiff to…

Alan Bock reviews the case for nuclear proliferation. Not sure I’m convinced, but it’s worth a read.

During Lent our church has been hosting a series of guest preachers at our Wednesday night service. Last week it was a professor from the local seminary, and she offered what I thought was an interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying, rumination on the problem of evil (taking the appointed Psalm, number 77, as her text). Since…

God does not need or demand Jesus’ death so as to be able to “change his mind” about us, to be moved from wrath to mercy. That is the mistaken assumption of at least some vicarious satisfaction theories. Rather, God sends Jesus because of his immutable resolve to have mercy, concretely to do the mercy…

This article has a lot of good information on the Fair Trade coffee movement, its history, and some of the controversies involved.