Apologies for the dearth of posts – I’ve been away on business since last Friday and am now spending Thanksgiving with my family in western Pennsylvania. Soon: more on sectarians and maybe something on Paul Griffiths’ article “Orwell for Christians,” which I think makes some important points. Happy Turkey Day to all!

Okay, this will probably be the last of these mammoth posts for a while. This month’s First Things arrived in the mail yesterday and one of the highlights is an essay (not online yet) by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the editor-in-chief of FT in which he offers a spirited defense of his particular brand of…

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…