I’m really about the last person anyone should be coming to for music recommendations – my efforts at “keeping up” with contemporary pop music range from pathetic to nonexistent – but hey it’s my blog. Here are a few albums I’ve been enjoying recently: Corrosion of Conformity, Deliverance (1994) I plugged CoC’s newest album In…

Here’s a nifty little essay from Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski called “How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” from his book Modernity on Endless Trial: Motto: “Please step forward to the rear!” This is an approximate translation of a request I once heard on a tram-car in Warsaw. I propose it as a slogan for the mighty…

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, this is from the introduction to Rowan Greer’s Christian Hope and Christian Life: The point I am trying to make is that a “here-and-now” Christianity, at least in my view, runs two risks–reducing the Christian life to a moralism of some kind and making the world of our experience…

It’s often said, to the point of being a truism, that American Christianity is obsessed with personal salvation and life after death. But is this really true? Theologian Rowan Greer, in his book Christian Hope and Christian Life, disagrees. He says that, if anything, American Christians have lost their sense of an otherworldly hope, and…

James Bovard points out that it’s quite a pass we’ve come to when a secret court of political appointees that virtually never denies a request for a warrant is considered too restrictive of the President’s powers. (via Antiwar)

In Chapter 4, “Understanding Biblical Teaching about Salvation,” Keith Ward argues against a reading of the biblical witness that suggests that only a tiny number of elect are destined for salvation. Rather, he argues, the thrust of the biblical teaching is toward a cosmic vision of the salvation of all things. He takes his cue…

Geologist Alan Cutler says that the much heralded (or lamented) “war between science and religion” is largely a myth: The historical relationship between science and religion has been as complex as any human relationship. There is no reason to think that this will change. The warfare thesis suits the polemical purposes of partisans in certain…

Anglican philosopher-theologian Keith Ward, recently retired professor of divinity at Oxford, has published a new book called What the Bible Really Teaches (about Crucifixion, Resurrection, Salvation, the Second Coming, and Eternal Life) that is a charitable but firm rebuke to fundamentalist readings of the Bible. Ward considers himself a “born-again” Christian, but says that fundamentalist…

This is from Thomas Merton’s little book (and I do mean little; it clocks in at under 50 pages) Praying the Psalms, which I’ve been reading: If there is one theme that is certainly to be found implicitly or explicitly in all the Psalms, it is the motif of Psalm One: “Blessed is the man…

The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Dick Polman has a good round-up of the debate in Washington over the Bush administration’s program warrant-less domesitc spying (“Executive Power: The controversy could become a hot political issue in ’06,” January 8, 2006 – can’t seem to find it online). Is it telling that even people who should be sympathetic are…