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…

Lew Rockwell and Justin Raimondo both have recent (characteristically overheated) columns about the growing “fascism” of the American right. William Marina of Liberty & Power critiques Rockwell here. Reason’s Jesse Walker has some thoughts here. The thrust of the Rockwell/Raimondo position is that American conservatism has shifted from being anti-government during the Clinton years to…

Surely American culture can’t be as insipid and superficial as critics claim when a theologian of the quality of David B. Hart can publish a piece on theodicy in a major newspaper: The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset…

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Lutheran World Relief is also at work providing relief to victims of the Asian tsunami. LWR is a pan-Lutheran (they act on behalf of ELCA and LCMS Lutherans) relief organization based in the U.S. that does a lot of good work, not only with disaster relief,…