Wow! Anne Rice has returned to the Catholic Church and has published a novel about Jesus’ “lost years” in Egypt. Rice knows “Out of Egypt” and its projected sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, “I was ready to do violence to my career.” But she sees a continuity with…

The UK Observer profiles the “new puritans” – twenty-something youngsters who build their lives around making “ethical choices” such as eschewing consumption, being ultra-health conscious, avoiding alcohol and tobacco and haranguing their friends and fellow citizens about their “lifestyle choices.” I can agree with the aims of some of these people to live in less…

Just a note that the much-heralded VI blogroll has been recently updated. Amazing how many good blogs there are out there.

It has long seemed plain to this Protestant that the invocation of saints’ prayers must be possible and if possible surely desirable. I certainly can ask a living fellow believer to pray for me. If death severed the fellowship of believers, I could not of course ask a departed fellow believer to pray for me.…

Via “Gaius” (the blogger formerly known as Marcus) comes this interesting tidbit about Americans’ support for various health care measures. Turns out we overwhelmingly support not only standard fare like Medicare, but also more drastic “socialistic” measures: The online survey of 2,242 U.S. adults found an overwhelming majority (96%) of Americans “strongly” or “somewhat” favor…

I’ve been reading Diogenes Allen’s Quest: The Search for Meaning Through Christ and have found that he develops some ideas that resonate with what I’ve long thought. Allen is addressing the condition of the “seeker” and trying to show how attending to the story of Jesus can draw them into the life of God. What…

Patricia E. Bauer writes about her experiences as a mother of a child with Down’s Syndrome in an age of prenatal testing. If it’s unacceptable for William Bennett to link abortion even conversationally with a whole class of people (and, of course, it is), why then do we as a society view abortion as justified…

From Christianity Today: President Bush faces a defining question of morality on which he has yet to receive any discernible guidance from the faith-based coalition that helped put him in office. The question: whether it is ever right for Americans to inflict cruel and degrading treatment on suspected terrorist detainees. We read credible reports—some from…

I once heard or read a story that Stanley Hauerwas, at a panel on the ethics of scientific research using aborted fetuses, asked a proponent of the research, “If it turned out that fetuses were a delicacy, would it be okay to eat them?” Obviously a kind of reductio ad absurdum, right? Well, the problem…

Brendan O’Neill skewers what he says is a new breed of rock stars who suck up to politicians, avoid drink and drugs, and generally have evacuated rock music of any trace of rebelliousness: When Noel Gallagher of Oasis visited Downing Street in July 1997 to congratulate the incumbent New Labour regime on its stunning victory,…