Interesting article detailing how left-right coalitions have passed several local environmentally friendly measures. Environmental issues, especially at the state and local levels, are bringing together conservatives and liberals who agree on little else, providing common ground in an increasingly polarized nation. One of the benefits of federalism and localism is that local politics seem to…

Michael Gilleland (you do read his blog, right?) has a great quote on reading from M. Somerset Maugham.

Speaking of the Passion, the sermon preached by our associate pastor yesterday made what I thought were some very good points, and some that I was less sure about. She started off by noting that we in the advanced industrialized West aren’t all that good at dealing with suffering. She attributed this to the fact…

That seems to have been the message of such anti-war demonstrations as there were this weekend to mark the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. As an opponent of the war I might be expected to sympathize with this message, but I’m far from certain that this would be the best course of action.…

Sang this one at church yesterday. (Although, for the record, I’m not crazy about this newfangled practice of conflating Palm Sunday and “Passion Sunday.” People can go to church on Good Friday, dammit! UPDATE: I realize that in one sense it makes perfect sense to observe Passion Sunday as inagurating Holy Week. Though until, I…

Here’s an article in the Guardian (via Get Religion) by two British Anglicans urging the Left to realize that it has religious allies and not to cede religious faith to the Right: Even comparatively recently things were looking up for the religious left. Tony Blair is a member of the Christian socialist movement and in…

Charles Krauthammer detects a double standard: After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the…

Today Camassia linked to this post from Rilina comparing Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics and J. H. Yoder’s Politics of Jesus. Rilina is dismayed by what s/he perceives as Wallis’ tendency to subordinate the core of Christianity to a progressive political agenda: What’s missing is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Really.…

Salon‘s Charles Taylor (no, not the evil dictator or the communitarian philosopher) heaps some well-deserved praise on my beloved O.C. in the New York Observer.

Things aren’t looking good for the President’s Social Security plan if this story is to be believed. Now, I don’t do much in the way of thinking about nitty gritty policy stuff here, because a) I don’t know that much about it and b) it doesn’t really interest me. But what I can do passably…