This looks good. Haven’t read the whole thing yet. (via Amy Welborn)

The post from Keith at ATR on the political significance of the sacraments reminded me of this essay by Peter Leithart from a few years ago. The problem with injecting politics into the church’s worship, according to Leithart, is that it presupposes that worship, considered in itself, is apolitical: My insistence on the inseparability of…

If you go to the Amazon page for The Hauerwas Reader and scroll down you will see this: Customers who shopped for this item also shopped for these items: After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas by Stanley Hauerwas With the Grain of the…

Non-libertarian Matthew Yglesias weighs in on the running debate between interventionist and non-interventionist libertarians: Making war is a massive deployment of the state’s coercive force, both against the target population and (in order to acquire the necessary warmaking resources) the warmaking nation’s home population. All ideological points-of-view represented in contemporary American society involve some skepticism…

Well, someone has been blogging up a storm at the Japery. (Is “Father Jape” a collective nome de blog for various contributors? That’s my suspicion…) Anyway, here we have a response to S. M. Huthchen’s piece on C. S. Lewis’ Protestantism (which I mentioned the other day). Fr. Jape notes the obsession many evangelicals and…

Keith at Among the Ruins meditates on how Christians should exercise power in the world: …I tend to shy away from any blending of the church with political power because I believe that it is inherently dangerous and almost always corrupting for the church. But, at the same time, I am not ready to give…

What slippery slope?

Via The Morning Retort I was directed to a stimulating exchange between two bloggers at ICTHUS debating the merits of “sectarian” and “transformist” Christian approaches to culture and society at large. (See here, here, and here for starters.) In comments to this post, Jennifer defends her sectarian comrades against the assaults of Fr. Neuhaus: I…

American ex-pat Nora Jacobson, who describes herself as “a bluestocking blue-stater,” has lived in Toronto since 2000, but it hasn’t been everything she expected: Although I enjoy my work and have made good friends here, I’ve found life as an American expatriate in Canada difficult, frustrating and even painful in ways that have surprised me.…

As part of my job, I was able to travel to San Antonio the weekend before Thanksgiving to attend the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. This is easily the largest yearly gathering of academics in the fields of religious studies, theology, biblical studies and comparative religion.…