A critique in three parts at Disputations: 1, 2, 3.

Here’s a juicy post from Brian Weatherson (via this Weatherson post at Crooked Timber (which was also cross-posted at his personal blog – got that?)). The gist: Let’s assume the following metaphysical claims are all true. There is a class of abstract possible worlds W. (I’m not going to say what abstract and concrete amount…

One of the risks of writing as an amateur or dilettante is that you run the risk of saying something that seems to you like a sparklingly original insight but in fact is territory that has been well-covered by specialists. On the other hand, there is a gratification in discovering an idea you’ve grasped your…

Two Lutheran blogs recently brought to my attention: I Am a Christian Too and Progressive Protestant. Both are part of a burgeoning group of Christian blogs that are self-consciously progressive or at least at pains to distinguish themselves from the Christian Right.

First, two from The Ivy Bush: How to (and how not to) respond theologically to the tsunami and a meditation on the pros and cons of civilization. Next, The Morning Retort replies to this post and points us to this review of Jim Wallis’ new book. The lesson MR draws is that the Left has…

I noted some dissatisfaction the other day with David B. Hart’s suggestion in his Opinion Journal piece that natural disasters like the recent tsunami can be explained, at least in part, by the fallenness of creation. Hart says: Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the…

The Christian Century reports on the increase in conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy among American Christians: The past several decades have seen an increase in conversions to Orthodoxy in the U.S. Frederica Mathewes-Green writes that nearly half the students in Orthodoxy’s two largest American seminaries—Holy Cross and St. Vladimir’s—are converts. The number of Antiochian Orthodox churches…

A group of church leaders, including George Hunsinger, Tony Campolo, Ron Sider and Jim Wallis, has penned an “open letter” to Alberto Gonzales: As a self-professed evangelical Christian, you surely know that all people are created in the image of God. You see it as a moral imperative to treat each human being with reverence…

Jacob Heilbrunn talks to Daniel Bell about our “endless culture wars.” Bell’s most famous work, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, argued that capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction by engendering a libertine consumerism that undermines the bourgeois values necessary to its own success. Bell was also one of the famed “New York Intellectuals”…

One of the unforseen consequences of President Bush’s re-election has been the new attention suddenly given to liberal or progressive Christians. Because Bush’s victory has widely (if perhaps erroneously) been attributed to religious “moral values” voters, some secular liberals have recognized the need to reach out to religious people, and left-of-center Christians have made new…