Last night I had a chance to go hear Jim Wallis of Sojourners give a talk on his new book God’s Politics. He was at the University of Pennsylvania bookstore as a stop on his book tour and it drew quite a crowd. Wallis was a very good speaker – charismatic, warm and funny (I…

I think the coolest thing about this is that the son of Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker is an evangelist who also played in a Social Distortion cover band. Talk about emergent church!

If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to…

And I’m not wild about a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage for a whole bunch of reasons. Still, this shows that many social conservatives do not necessarily buy into the slash and burn approach to the welfare state. (Also see here and here.)

Via LewRockwell.com I came across this essay on “libertarian just war theory” by Wendy McElroy. Her conclusion: “Given these [just war] requirements, a libertarian just war is virtually unimaginable.” I’ve wondered for a while now whether the requirements of just war theory are so strict as to rule out virtually any modern war (see, esp.…

Thomas at Endlessly Rocking has a very interesting series of posts on what he calls the “individualist paradox.” In short, he says that often those who are most vocal in their denunciations of “individualism” in their churches and as a result become converts to another, supposedly less individualistic, tradition are in fact engaging in a…

Reihan Salam, whose LA Times article I linked to a while back, has a post outlining his suggestions for a new class-oriented politics for the GOP. It should, he says, be all about empowering the “aspirational classes,” those who, in John O’Sullivan’s words are striving to better their condition-whether that betterment has to do with…

A surprising article (considering the source) on the Terri Schiavo case at Salon: Today, our humanity is perched on the precipice of a slippery slope. A disabled woman in Tampa, Fla., breathing on her own and cared for by her parents, is to be denied a simple feeding tube, thereby hastening her death and freeing…

The prolific Keith Burgess-Jackson has started another blog – The Conservative Philosopher. KBJ has enlisted several contributers so far, including Bill Vallicella. As a dabbler in philosophy and a student (though not quite an adherent) of conservatism, I’m sure I’ll be visiting regularly. Long may it prosper!

I really want to like this column by Roberto Rivera y Carlo because I think it gets some important things right. Rivera y Carlo criticizes our culture of careerism that emphasizes work over family: In the West, however much we “value” marriage and family, our approach to the matter says that we esteem them less…