Here’s a list of organizations providing relief to victims of Hurricane Katrina. ELCA online donations here.

Heh

Interesting piece from “paleocon” Thomas Fleming in the London Spectator (registration req’d): America has always been a strange place, even to Americans. While most countries are content merely to exist, America is supposed to have a project, a destiny, a divine mission. New England Puritans suffered from the delusion that their little settlement was a…

Pietism gets a bad rap, especially in Lutheran circles it seems. The pietists are reviled by conservatives and liberals alike – the former accuse them of ignoring doctrine, wallowing in subjectivism and emotionalism, and fostering legalism, while the latter deride them as embracing a privatized, individualistic faith that is oblivious to the larger issues of…

Remember when we went to war in Kosovo to protect the heroic freedom-loving Kosovar Albanians from the depredations of the evil Serbs? Right. So, anyway, in the course of reading this story on the UN’s failure to protect the Roma (a.k.a. Gypsies) residing in their refugee camps from lead poisoning, I came across this little…

A sinister conspiracy by the beauty-fashion industrial complex, no doubt. Qui bono? indeed.

Alan Bock makes the case for immediate withdrawal from Iraq (without thinking that it’s actually going to happen). Caleb McDaniel has a good post on the reaction to Pat Robertson’s now-infamous remarks. Camassia and I have been going round a bit on infant baptism. Pr. Frontz writes on “the domestication of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

One common criticism of President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq is that the UN-imposed sanctions were “working” – i.e. containing Saddam Hussein’s expansionist ambitions and his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. That fact that the U.S. has indeed not found the dreaded WMD seems to confirm this. While the efficacy…

Brandon at Siris posted his list of twenty “must read” science fiction novels. Very interesting. Readers chimed in with their suggestions. I’ve only read about five of the titles on Brandon’s list – looks like I’ve got some catching up to do! Currently I’m in the middle of Gene Wolfe’s novella trilogy The Fifth Head…

Though I was opposed to the Iraq war from the get-go, I’ve been ambivalent, like many people, about what the U.S. should do now that it’s there. After all, whatever the wisdom of going in, Saddam’s regime was truly evil, and I had harbored the hope that it might be possible to help create a…