Harvard Law professor and evangelical Christian William J. Stuntz thinks secular academics and evangelicals have more in common than they might like to admit, and even thinks a political alliance might be feasible: True, university faculties are heavily Democratic, and evangelical churches are thick with Republicans. But that red-blue polarization is mostly a consequence of…

From S. M. Hutchens at Christianity Today’s Books & Culture: For many Catholics C. S. Lewis is an enigma that needs explaining. This is especially true for those who are strongly attracted to his writings, and most particularly those for whom he has been of aid in their own pilgrimages from Protestantism to Rome. How…

Apparently by not shopping on the day after Thanksgiving I was engaging in an innovative form of social protest! And here I thought it was just an aversion to crowds. Who knew? Max Sawicky has some interesting thoughts on anti-consumerism, work and leisure here.

Camassia continues to blog her way through John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. One of the great virtues of Yoder’s work, in my view, is to situate the debate between pacifism and just-war as an attempt to answer to the question: How do we most faithfully follow Jesus? Yoder’s project can be viewed as…

Here’s Rodney Clapp on the Pledge of Allegiance: The Supreme Court’s June ruling on whether “under God” should be part of the Pledge of Allegiance passed with relatively little notice, since the case was rejected on procedural grounds. For those who paid attention to the arguments, however, it conclusively exposed the incompatibility of American civil…

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.…