Recently, I spoke to an audience of college kids. The subject was our president. For 20 minutes or so, I gave them my assessment of George W. Bush, that he is a spoiled rich kid who wasted his youth partying with his frat-boy buddies and then woke up one morning and decided to become president.…

Last week I attended a discussion at our church on “Christians and the Upcoming Election.” The featured speaker was Rev. Philip Krey, the president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary here in Philadelphia. The purpose of this gathering was not to decide on one candidate or the other, but to clarify the context in which Christians,…

Various bloggers have weighed in on the issue of voting. One of the more thoughtful is Tom at Disputations who has done a series of posts from his Catholic perspective (there are lots of good posts from Oct 7th to today). Also, Among the Ruins has several worthwhile posts (here, here and here). Link via…

Items of interest from various sources (note: linking does not necessarily imply agreement!) Georgie Anne Geyer: Four More Years of War? If the United States is to have another four years of this kind of foreign policy, it will come to be considered an outlaw in the world, most of its historical standards and principles…

Here is a statement being circulated by Richard B. Hays of Duke Univeristy, George Hunsinger of Princeton, Glen Stassen of Fuller Theological Seminary and Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine. They accuse the Bush administration of embracing a “theology of war” that threatens to turn the nation into an idol: Faithfully confessing Christ is the church’s…

I didn’t watch the debate last night (I was engrossed in this instead), but I can’t help but notice that all the liberal sites are declaring Kerry the winner, while all the conservative sites say Bush cleaned his clock. To wit: “Kerry Closes the Deal” by William Saletan at Slate (tagline: “Kerry Crushes Bush”) “Strike…

I missed this the first time I read this interview with Ralph Nader in the American Conservative, but it was pointed out by Bill Samuel at his “seamless garment” weblog: PB: Let me move to the social issues. Would you have voted against or in favor of the ban on partial-birth abortion? RN: I believe…

Such scrupulousness in thinking about voting might reasonably be taken to be a sign of a mind with an unbalanced set of priorities. After all, you vote and you hope for the best outcome, right? Or the lesser of two evils. Your vote isn’t even going to make much of a difference anyway! There’s certainly…

Steven Riddle at Flos Carmeli (a wonderful blog, by the way) read the same Crisis piece I linked to earlier and responds: What is astounding in the excerpt above is its lack of recognition that refusal to vote is NOT inaction, it is action at its very highest. Refusal of moral compromise is the most…

As I quoted below Paul Griffiths says: [I]n the case of voting (which is also a deal: I vote, as I hope you do, in response to what a candidate advocates and has done), there are also deal breakers, which is to say actions done or positions advocated sufficient to make voting for someone improper,…