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,…

Vaughn at ICTHUS asks what use philosophy is for Christians. I started to type a comment, but it got so unwieldy that I thought I’d make a blog post of it instead. Vaughn says: …I may say that it is difficult for me to understand how philosophy can be a practice that is prior to…

Word on the street is that Bob Casey Jr. is contemplating a run to replace conservative golden boy Rick Santorum in 2006 (see here – via A Green Conservatism). Casey, the son of late Pa. governor Bob Casey was just elected State Treasurer by an overwhelmeing margin and has long had designs on the Governor’s…

Russell Arben Fox has a very interesting post on what it might mean to live the simple life in our technology- and consumption-driven culture. I admit that I’ve been pretty put off by the agrarianism of people like Wendell Berry if, for no other reason, than it seems like they advocate a way of life…

Some belated MLK-day reading. Here’s Heather Gray on King’s theory of non-violent social change and Greg Moses on “King and the Christian Left” both from Counterpunch.

An interesting post from Get Religion on how various media outlets spun the story. Of course, it is, as I understand it, still up to the churchwide assembly this summer to accept or reject the recommendations of the task force (though, I would be very surprised if the cwa took a more liberal line than…

By “epistemological imperialism” I mean demanding that a particular subject matter be knowable by means unsuited to it. We don’t expect the same precision from ethics that we expect from mathematics, and to insist upon that would be an instance of epistemological imperialism. Likewise, the “brights” like Richard Dawkins demand that theology conform to the…

How “painless” is it? See here. (via A Conservative Blog for Peace)

Just as Democrats are wondering how they can win over culturally conservative red-state voters, some of those very same cultural conservatives are questioning aspects of their alliance with political conservatism. In the January issue of Touchstone, Gillis J. Harp (sorry, article not online) critiques conservatives like Rich Lowry of National Review for thinking that tax…