I have no opinion on the Michael Jackson case, not having followed it closely enough. But I thought this was a good article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. Also of note from Couterpunch: House Republicans vs. Bush on the war.

The NYT has an article on a group of fresh-faced young interns at the conservative Heritage Foundation – a think-tank in D.C. for those blissfully ignorant of the world of policy wonkery. While there is something inherently disturbing about conservative youths, this bit in particular struck me as summing up a lot of what’s wrong…

Michael Brendan Dougherty posted a link to this great article by Bill Kauffman that I remember reading a couple of years ago, titled, improbably, “Dorothy Day and the American Right.” I’m a big fan of Kauffman’s writing; he’s a kind of humanistic, small-l libertarian – more H.D. Thoreau than Ayn Rand. His books America First…

You scored as Neo orthodox. You are neo-orthodox. You reject the human-centredness and scepticism of liberal theology, but neither do you go to the other extreme and make the Bible the central issue for faith. You believe that Christ is God’s most important revelation to humanity, and the Trinity is hugely important in your theology.…

In what is otherwise a valuable article, Chris Hedges repeats a charge that has become something of a commonplace among critics of the Bush administration’s foreign policy: This myth, the lie, about war, about ourselves, is imploding our democracy. We shun introspection and self-criticism. We ignore truth, to embrace the strange, disquieting certitude and hubris…

Martin Luther’s pretty far down there… You scored as Karl Barth. The daddy of 20th Century theology. You perceive liberal theology to be a disaster and so you insist that the revelation of Christ, not human experience, should be the starting point for all theology. Anselm 80% Augustine 80% Karl Barth 80% John Calvin 73%…

An article from Books & Culture on Bonhoeffer and the just war vs. pacifism question. Everyone wants to claim Bonhoeffer – just warriors appeal to his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler; pacifists point to his writings, especially Discipleship. I confess that I have a hard time with the view – sometimes brought up…

Christianity is not reconciliation with death. It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life. Christ is this Life. And only if Christ is Life, is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely the enemy to be destroyed, and not a “mystery” to be explained. Religion…

Having been hanging around Lutheranism (at least in its ELCA version) for about five years now, I’ve noticed that, like many other mainline Protestant denominations, there are several distinct sub-groups or factions that appear to co-exist with varying degrees of tension. For instance, most readers are probably familiar with the divisions within Anglicanism between evangelicals,…

Following the George Lucas approach of setting expectations so low that you can’t help but exceed them, the new Batman flick looks like it’ll be light years ahead of the last two horrible, horrible entries in the series. The two typical approaches to the character are either campy (think the 60s tv series) or ultra…