An fascinating article from Salon. Maybe they can make common cause with the League of the South? The Vermont economist mentioned in the article, Thomas Naylor advocates a “peaceful, democratic, libertarian, grassroots movement opposed to the tyranny of the United States” and “the Vermont of small towns, small farms, small businesses, local governance, grass-roots democracy,…

Radley Balko has a post very much worth reading on the inevitable consequences of war, no matter how well-intentioned. Some highlights: Let’s look at this in purely self-interested terms. What do you suppose is going to become of this little girl? Think she’ll dismiss her dead parents in light of the larger picture, this grand…

Or at least that’s what Jody Bottum suggests in this article on the President’s inagural speech: No, President Bush’s opponents should be afraid of this speech because it signals the emergence of a single coherent philosophy within the conservative movement. Natural-law reasoning about the national moral character gradually disappeared from America in the generations after…

I’ve been skeptical that the Left was willing to embrace Christians (even “progressive” Christians) with open arms, and this column (via Get Religion) from The Nation‘s Katha Pollitt supplies further evidence for such skepticism. Pollitt just can’t bring herself to believe that Jim Wallis, for all his progressive bona fides, isn’t itching to put the…

A very good piece from Archbishop Rowan Williams (via Scandal of Particularity): Do I have a right to die? Religious believers answer for themselves that they do not. For a believer to say, “The time could come when I find myself in a situation that has no meaning, and I reserve the right to end…

Just in case you were wondering.

I should mention that I commend the Grant McCracken post linked to in the previous post in its own right. He offers a thoughtful critique of “buy local” movements and other attempts to artificially restrict choice for the sake of some kind of aesthetic “purity.” It really is a vexing question: how much choice is…

The biggest challenge to transmitting the faith in the 21st century, according to Paul Griffiths, is that we have been inculcated by the culture of “late capitalism” into thinking of our identities as essentially items of taste. The Church (and he means the Catholic Church, but it could just as well apply to Protestantism) cannot…

The January issue of First Things is now online in its entirety. Highlights include “Just War, as It Was and Is” by James Turner Johnson and “The Laughter of the Philosophers” by David B. Hart.

This looks like a promising new blog: Caelum et Terra seems to be the successor to the magazine of the same name (see here). C&T espouses a philosophy of (for lack of a better term) Catholic agrarianism or distributism. Or in their words: …our vision was (and is) mystical, contemplative, distributist, agrarian, sacramental, ecumenical, aesthetic,…