I’ve noticed a spate of articles recently on churches trying to make themselves more “hip” to appeal to teens and twentysomethings (Here’s one for instance. Here’s another.). This seems at least loosely connected to the “emerging church” phenomenon which is, among other things, trying to recover (or invent?) a more “authentic” and “meaningful” style of…

Steven Riddle has a series of posts on the practice of lectio divina (here, here, and here). via David Koyzis, an interesting-looking site: Ron Dart, Red Tory and High-Church Anglican. Josh has found something very disturbing. Also, while searching for something else I came across this interesting document: A Theologians’ Brief on the place of…

I’m about 35 pages into John Howard Yoder’s Karl Barth and the Problem of War. The text is an account and critique of Barth’s views on war, based on Barth’s writings as well as personal conversations Yoder had with him. Chapter 3 offers a general overview of Barth’s approach to the ethics of killing. While…

Salon has an interesting article on the great Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man. It notes the role Ditko’s exteme political individualism came to influence his art: Sixties hipsters thought that Ditko’s urban realism and trippy visions meant that he was one of them. They couldn’t have been much more wrong. Around the time that Ditko…

The wife is out of town for a few days, so I loaded up the Netflix queue with things I knew she wouldn’t want to watch. Last night’s offering was Shenandoah, a 1965 Jimmy Stewart vehicle in which Stewart plays Charlie Anderson, a farmer and widower living on his Viriginia farm with his seven children…

Fr. Jim Tucker has a series of Star Wars thought experiments of a political nature.

Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC), who led the campaign to get the French fries in the House of Representatives’ cafeterias changed to “freedom fries,” now says we went to war in Iraq “with no justification.”

Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, has an article in the American Conservative on Paul Wolfowitz. Bacevich sees Wolfowitz’s worldview as a response to the classic problem of “dirty hands.” Thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr famously held that it was sometimes necessary to incur guilt while wielding power in service to the the good.…

What sober-minded man, then, will not acknowledge that we are not atheists, worshipping as we do the Maker of this universe, and declaring, as we have been taught, that He has no need of streams of blood and libations and incense; whom we praise to the utmost of our power by the exercise of prayer…

God gives what He commands. This testimony of non-violence is not an ‘ideal’ which will appear at the end of our ‘efforts.’ Here, as everywhere else, the life of obedience to which we are called is given to us by grace. This weakness, which I called a demand implied in the Gospel, is really a…