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…

Memorial Day has occasioned some provocative reflections on the nature of what allegiance, if any, the Christian should give to the secular political order. Pastor John Wright (via Eric) called this the “most dangerous weekend of the year” because it tempts Christians to buy into the mythos of the nation-state, something Pr. Wright deems a…

Speaking of abortion (and I’m not usually that interested in discussing it on the ol’ blog, but we’ll make an exception today), one thing that puzzles me is these congressmen who claim to be “pro-life” but favor embryonic stem cell research: Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R., Calif.), a conservative who described himself as “100 percent…

That was the claim made by Christian ethicist Glen Stassen. Stassen and others inferred that an increase in “economic injustice” because of Bush’s policies was the culprit. But according to this (via Amy Welborn) that claim is, well, false: Politicians from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Howard Dean have recently contended that abortions have…