The Inquirer has jumped on the trying-to-understand-those-kooky-evangelical-Christians bandwagon, running a series of stories over the past few weeks on various aspects of modern evangelicalism. Yesterday’s paper, though, had two pretty good stories higlighting the often underreported diversity of political views among evangelicals. They emphasized the concerns many have beyond the usual triad of abortion, gay…

Via Eve Tushnet comes this article making the case for trade, rather than aid with Africa. It blames U.S. agricultural subsidies for directly contributing to African poverty (and raising the cost of living for American consumers to boot): U.S. agriculture policy undermines U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty because it drives down global agricultural prices, which…

Marvin has a most excellent post on the creationism vs. evolution debate. I don’t object, in principle, to people pursuing things like “intelligent design” (which is not the same thing as “young earth creationism” or Genesis-literalism). I don’t know enough about it to say what its merits as a theory are; it seems to me…

I don’t claim to understand everything in this John Milbank essay that Russell discussed yesterday (I will assume, as a matter of charity, that it’s my fault and not Milbank’s), but I do have a couple of bones to pick with it. Milbank seems to be contrasting a strawman version of “liberalism” (by which I…

The military is having a tough time meeting recruiting goals I suppose because fewer people want to go get shot at in a war that a majority of Americans now say has not made us safer. What to do? Well, the sensible solution, as offered in this piece by Christopher Preble, would be to scale…

Batman Begins has been getting some glowing reviews. Here’s one from The Onion’s AV Club.

Marcus thinks I was too easy on the Bush administration here. My point, though, was the quite narrow one that there was some justification for beleiving that Saddam posessed some WMD, and that the administration seems to have sincerely beleived he did. I don’t like to speculate about motives since I don’t have access to…

I’m happy to see that the House has voted to strip the PATRIOT (sic!) Act of the provisions which permit the Feds to look at library book and bookstore sale records. Even in the unlikely event that it makes it past the Senate and the President, there are other provisions dealing with search warrants and…

The ever-interesting Eugene McCarraher reviews Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics in Books & Culture. (via Kevin Jones) The Amish as technological innovators! (via Gutless Pacifist) Russell Arben Fox (who compensates for the infrequency of his posts with sheer meaty substance) comments on John Milbank’s theological politics. (Have I mentioned that reading Milbank makes my head hurt?)…

Good, balanced article from Fred Kaplan at Slate on the now-infamous “Downing Street Memo” and its significance: The “killer quote” in the original Sunday Times story is this passage from the July 23 ministers’ meeting: C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen…