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.”

Blogger emeritus Peter Nixon in Commonweal: It is hard to escape the conclusion that the distinct voice that Catholics once brought to the public square is gradually being lost. In its place, we see the emergence of two separate Catholic political cultures, each serving the needs of one of the two major parties, and each…

Or, more precisely, in what sense can we say the church “created” the canon of Scripture (since “the church” obviously preceded the NT)? And what does this mean for the Protestant principle of sola scriptura? The age-old debate is revisited at Here We Stand and Pontifications. See here, here, and here. I think all parties…

Go here and find out.

Eric Lee asks how a non-pacifist interprets such Biblical passages as Jesus’ commendation of nonresistance in chapter 5 of Matthew’s Gospel. Now, not only am I not a biblical scholar, I’m not even a particularly well-versed or frequent reader of Scripture! So, hopefully someone with a real theological education will jump in here. Nevertheless, bloggers…

I’m going to reply to a couple of points Camassia made about just war theory (hereafter JWT) starting with what I thought were two particularly incisive questions of hers that I mentioned here. Camassia writes: When I read the people Lee quotes, or the article I linked last week, the arguments remind me of Martin…

Here is the text of a brief treatise Martin Luther wrote on prayer. His barber Peter had asked Luther for advice on how to pray, and this was his response. Luther recommends taking a portion of Scripture such as the Ten Commandments or a Psalm, or the Creed or the Lord’s Prayer, and making of…

This post on heresy generated some very good comments, so I thought I would just throw one last thing into the mix. Lutheran theologian Ed Schroeder (whose Thursday Theology column has become a must-read for me) discusses here how “good fruits” must be rooted in the Gospel: The object of Christian faith, the reality that…