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…

Here’s Wesley J. Smith on the latest developments in the “right to die” movement: The international euthanasia movement’s first principle is radical individualism. The idea is that we each own our own body and hence should be able to do what we choose with our physical self — including destroy it. Not only that, but…

Will Wilkinson: We’ve all seen, and have grown weary of, the wide array of red/blue/purple political maps. The purplish tones are supposed to show us, I guess, that even a “red state” is a mix of red and blue people. It’s not binary: all red or all blue. Yes. I guess. But the thing that…

Jennifer at Scandal of Particularity has an answer for those who want religious believers to butt out of public affairs: …I reject the position that I have my opinion, and you have yours, and thus you should not attempt to force your “opinion” on mine. (Kind of a “get your rosaries off my ovaries” slogan…