There’s a lot of loose talk abroad about how Christianity has been or should be affected by, understand, or resist “postmodernism.” More often than not people either don’t define what they mean by postmodernism, or they set up strawmen (e.g. postmodernism=there is no truth!!), or they uncritically accept that we live in a “postmodern” age…

Via Michael Gilleland I see there has been a bit of a dust-up at The Conservative Philosopher resulting in Max Goss’ departure from the blog (see here and here). Once again it seems an example of blogland taking itself a bit too seriously. But the happy result for me is that I have been directed…

Nat Hentoff points our attention to a recently published New Yorker piece detailing the history of the practice of “extraordinary renditions” — i.e. sending suspects abroad to countries that are less than scrupulous about the use of torture. The New Yorker piece is here.

Kevin Carson posts on the decentralist tradition on the Left as represented by folks like E. F. Schumacher and Kirkpatrick Sale: Today, as much as ever, the good guys on the left and right fringe have more in common with each other than with the bad guys in the corporate center. As I’ve written elsewhere,…

One of the problems with the debate between pacifism and just war theory is that it often strays into a theoretical argument totally untethered from the biblical texts (Camassia’s complaint), or it gets mired in pulling out various bits of Scripture and using them as proof-texts. Proponents of Just War Theory often appeal to John…

Robert Higgs questions the usual rankings of presidential “greatness”: One need not ponder the rankings long, however, to discover a remarkable correlation: all but one of the presidents ranked as Great or Near Great had an intimate association with war, either in office or by reputation before taking office. Of the top-ranking “nine immortals,” five…

Last week I mentioned that philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe condemned President Truman as a war criminal on account of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Historian Ralph Raico has an article today that mentions Anscombe’s critique: Those who may still be troubled by such a grisly exercise in cost-benefit analysis – innocent Japanese lives balanced against…

Cathy Young writes that red-staters aren’t as scary as they’re made out to be, nor does the right have a monopoly on “moral bullying.” Here’s a point that could stand to be made more often: In many ways, the cultural conservatives want to do no more than roll back the clock to a fairly recent…

No, not that GW, the first one, as in “First in War, First in Peace and First in the Hearts of His Countrymen.” UPDATE: William Marina at Liberty & Power questions the characterization of GW as “anti-imperialist.”