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,…

A powerful sermon from a United Methodist(!) bishop calling for a stronger witness on abortion as part of a consistent life ethic: In the United Methodist Church often many of us are silent and passive about abortion. At the same time, we can be outspoken and active in our opposition to war and capital punishment.…

If you’re interested in truly radical libertarianism (and, honestly, who isn’t??), let me commend Kevin Carson’s Mutualist blog. The tag line is “free-market anti-capitalism.” Parse that!

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…