Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada has been elected to the post of minority leader in the Senate, replacing Tom Daschle. Sen. Reid is characterized by CNN as opposing abortion rights (it also says he’s pro gun rights). NARAL gives him a 29% approval rating, while National Right to Life gives him a 55%. Could this…

Let me try and give a concrete example of why I’m not clear on the practical upshot of the realist/sectarian distinction. Last night I was re-reading Stanley Hauerwas’s essay “Abortion Theologically Understood”. His main contention is that the church should not get bogged down in the debate over rights, whether that be the “right to…

One of the central issues Christians have to grapple with in considering their political involvement in the world is the theological or moral status of the social institutions they might seek to influence. Preeminently this means the government, but it may also include corporations and other business, non-profit agencies and other institutional actors in society.…

Bill Keezer comments on this post: We have to be a bit careful here. Paul in his second letter to the Thessalonians states that those who will not work should not eat. Protecting the poor from predation and protecting them from the consequences of bad decisions are two different things that often are conflated. This…

From the ever-sensible Steven Waldman: The idea that this was a victory for people who care about morality over those who don’t is galling to liberals because, for many of them, the number one issue in this election was Iraq — and their opposition to the incumbent administration was almost entirely grounded in moral concerns.…

Steven Riddle at Flos Carmeli has a thoughtful discussion of just war vs. pacifism. One thing that I think needs to be kept in mind in discussions about just war is that, strictly speaking, we should talk about just (or justifiable) acts of war rather than “just wars” simpliciter. As Paul Ramsey argued, war is…

Theologian William T. Cavanaugh says that Christians should not look to the state to defend the common good: The nation-state is neither community writ large nor the protector of smaller communal spaces, but rather originates and grows over against truly common forms of life. This is not necessarily to say that the nation-state cannot and…

Last week Keith Burgess-Jackson posted a short entry that took liberals to task for invoking Jesus in support of programs to redistribute wealth: I’m tired of hearing liberals claim that Christianity supports wealth redistribution of the sort Democrats propose. Perhaps I’m ignorant, but I don’t know of any occasion in the Bible in which Jesus…

Since the new conventional wisdom seems to have us all sorting ourselves into our little red and blue camps, I thought it would be a good time to revisit this essay from Frederica Mathewes-Green.

The overriding conflict of our time is not that between democracies and totalitarianism, not between those who are for human freedom and those who seek to repress it. Rather the overriding conflict of our time is the same as that from the beginning for it is the conflict between those that would remain loyal to…