Maybe you’d like to revive the ancient practice of abstaining from meat during Lent (a practice still observed by many Orthodox Christians, who, as I understand it, also fast from eggs and dairy making them virtual vegans!). If so, check out this site.

So, I noticed among the much-discussed Time magazine list of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals” is Brian McLaren who, it appears, is the founder/guru/grand poobah of something called the “Emerging (emergent?) church.” Can somebody fill me in on what this is all about? From what I’ve been able to glean, it seems to be made…

The New Pantagruel 3.1 is up and, as usual, it offers a feast of meaty articles from a variety of perspectives. I haven’t has a chance to dig in yet, but this article on the resurrection of Caelum et Terra looks good, as does this piece by Michael Baxter on the notion of “one nation…

Is suffering redemptive? There is certainly no rule to say it is. If there were, it would only be a new law, a new way. We are not promised, however, a life free from suffering for the time being. Indeed, we are led to expect that anyone who sets out on a journey of faith…

Via Hugo I found a link to Home, Throne & Altar, the blog of John, a conservative, royalist, pentecostal-holiness New Zealander! (Ain’t the blog-world grand? (N.B. I refuse to employ the barbaric neologism “blogosphere.” Trying saying that out loud and see how dumb it sounds.)) Anyhoo, John has a post on abortion and how he…

Marcus makes a conservative case for gay marriage. Camassia engages in a little UN-baiting, which I applaud. Despite my disagreements with large swaths of what passes for conservative orthodoxy I am still enough of a right-winger to find the UN creepy and vaguely threatening. Via Keith Burgess-Jackson, an interview from a few years ago with…

This is the sort of thing that drives libertarians nuts. And yet, It’s hard to deny the logic of a statement like this: …modern government, with its myriad prescriptions, proscriptions and incentives, cannot help but endorse and, to some extent, enforce certain values. So it should be thoughtful and articulate about it. This is essentially…

Nothing really new here. But a useful roundup of the apparently growing conservative discontent on the war.

Why are we so squeamish about torture? More specifically, why do we think that torturing someone is worse than killing him? My evidence that we do in fact think this is that there has been so much controversy over whether the government ever has the right to torture people, but there has been very little…

William T. Cavanaugh argues against justifying torture by appeals to the idea that “everything changed” on 9/11. He quotes Walter Benjamin, “the state of emergency is not the exception but the rule in history.” The Christian counter-story, says Cavanaugh, is this: …this is not an exceptional nation and we do not live in exceptional times,…