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…

In talking about war and the question of what attitude Christians in particular should take regarding the use of force, it might be helpful to distinguish two traditions or strains of just war thinking. These two strains are distinguished, I think we could say, by what they judge to be the paradigm instance of a…

Let me just say, for the record that I always liked Howard Dean. I mean, not that I voted for him (as an independent I am not eligible to vote in party primaries in Pennsylvania, and anyway, by the time we had our primary it was a done deal), but he always came across as…

Inspired by Arthur Paul Boers I decided that a good Lenten discipline for me would be to try to improve my shockingly bad practice of prayer by praying a regular daily office. I’m using a version put out by the Society of Saint Francis (Anglican) called Celebrating Common Prayer. The offices are keyed to the…