Control the thoughts by controlling the tongue, says Steven Riddle.

The Darkest Night of the Year by Over the Rhine UPDATE: Wow – great minds think alike! The Morning Retort has a post on OTR’s Christmas album and on seeing them recently. (Side note: I saw them at a teeny tiny bar in Philadelphia in the fall I think it was. Linford was cajoled by…

Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Here’s Keith Burgess-Jackson on Singer’s Animal Liberation: Obviously, each of us has many interests, the main one being the interest in not suffering. Let us call beings who have the capacity to suffer “sentient beings.” You and I are sentient beings. Cows, pigs, turkeys, and…

Despite being underwhelmed by their post-Zooropa output, all the hype got to me and I picked up U2’s How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. I have to say, it is a darn fine record. In particular, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own,” “Crumbs From Your Table,” “City of Blinding Lights” and “All Becuase…

Nat Hentoff on Alberto Gonzales, President Bush’s nominee to replace John Ashcroft as AG: In the July–August 2003 Atlantic Monthly, Alan Berlow wrote a long, carefully documented article, “The Texas Clemency Memos,” which told of the role of Gonzales, then legal counsel to Texas governor George W. Bush, in deciding the fate of prisoners on…

As far as I can tell, the “Emergent Church” is to evangelicalism what the “postliberal” church is to mainline Protestantism, i.e. an attempt to come to grips with postmodernity through a recovery of a more robust sense of what it means to be the church, often drawing on pre-modern and pre-Reformation sources for inspiration. The…

As I mentioned here, I think a commitment to pacifism could have major ramifications for how one relates to the larger structures of society, especially the state. So, in that vein, I’ve been wondering: Does a pacifist have an obligation to avoid endorsing political leaders who employ violence? For instance, in his book Choosing Against…

This is very weird but fascinating. Not sure what to think about it.

The Nation has a forum up with input from various left-wing and liberal luminaries trying to hash out where they should go in the wake of the election. Here are some snippets I found of particular interest: SUSANNAH HESCHEL: Democrats are being advised to respond to their election losses by enhancing their rhetoric of religion.…

After some not-so-subtle prodding from me, Jennifer graciously responded in greater detail to some of my questions about “sectarian” Christian social ethics. Her response comes in the form of a reply to the criticisms offered by Robert Benne in this essay I had linked to earlier. Here’s Benne’s criticism: If God is indeed the creator…