The Internet Monk has two very good posts on the question of inerrancy and how he reads the Bible. Well worth reading.

There is a long-running debate about whether a “demand side” or “supply side” approach is the best way to bringing down the abortion rate. Myself, I favor both – more support for moms and kids and restrictions on abortion when and where moral consensus exists (e.g. parental notification laws, PBA ban, etc.). And an ongoing…

New Over the Rhine album, March 29th! See here.

Jeremy Lott reviews a new book on the various quests for the historical Jesus and their limitations. Sounds like a good read: Yes, Jesus was a teacher of Jewish wisdom, the author says, but he also warned that the end would come, and many would be caught unawares. He was kind, but he was also…

Chris at Progressive Protestant took issue with my somewhat tongue-in-cheek post calling for the return of the heresy trial: I’ve read a handful of posts in the last week (this one today) about doing quality control on Christianity or various denominations, weeding out gays, kicking out the “heretical,” counterbalancing the open, seeker-friendly stance taken by…

I don’t want to turn this into the “all just war theory all the time” blog, but what’s the point of having a blog if not to indulge my own personal idiosyncratic interests? To that end, I thought I’d post some excerpts from Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe’s (1919-2001) essay “War and Murder.”* Anscombe was, in…

Here’s an article by Theodore Dalrymple about the question of German “victimhood” and the bombing of Dresden that is germane to some of the recent discussion here. On the question of whether the bombing of Dresden constituted a kind of war crime he writes: I don’t think any decent, civilized person can look at pictures…

I gained a whole new respect for our church’s associate pastor when yesterday at lunch she complained that clergy are defrocked (or whatever the Lutheran equivalent of defrocking is) for sexual or financial misconduct but never for heresy! She is quite “liberal” on issues of sexuality and the like, so this was surprising to me.…

In the article I linked to the other day, David B. Hart takes issue with the interpretation of just war theory I’ve been discussing that counsels Chrisitians to abjure self-defense: [I]t is strange to see Cole attempting to reconcile the developed Thomistic language of charity as a virtue with the older, somewhat more implausible belief…

Probably no one did more, at least in Protestant circles, to revive just war thinking in the 20th century than Methodist ethicist Paul Ramsey. Ramsey explicitly defends just warfare as an act of “social charity,” or what I’ve been calling a neighbor-love oriented approach. In his essay “Justice In War” (first published in 1964) Ramsey…