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Friday Links
–John Cohn at The New Republic on the end of “compassionate conservatism.” –Should life be more like a game? — The rise of white identity politics in DC? –From Book Forum, a collection of links on how we treat animals. (I guess that makes this a meta-link?) –How Pearl Jam went from being the biggest…
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The bishops vs. Elizabeth Johnson
The US Catholic bishops’ committee on doctrine is accusing feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson of “criticiz[ing] and … revis[ing] in a radical fashion the conception of God revealed in Scripture and taught by the Magisterium” in her recent book Quest for the Living God. What seems to be at issue is Johnson’s contention–more fully fleshed out…
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Unredeemed history and Christian anti-Judaism
In her book Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Origins of Anti-Semitism, Rosemary Radford Ruether argues that a key difference between Christianity and Judaism is that Christianity has been unwilling for much of its history to live with the tension of the unrealized messianic age. As a result, Christians have accused Jews of being blind to…
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Divine determinism and divine sovereignty
Marvin argues that a doctrine of divine determinism–that everything that happens, even apparently horrible things like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, is an expression of God’s will–is actually a more comforting doctrine than people sometimes give it credit for: If this sounds harsh, and as I said last week, I am against harshness as…
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Now that’s a book I’d like to read
Cover Author Working On Word-For-Word Remake Of ‘Moby-Dick’ LOS ANGELES—Cover author Gerald Putty told reporters Monday that he is about six months away from finishing a word-for-word rewrite of Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick, saying that his version will be “utterly true in every way” to the original. “When you cover a novel like this, you’re…
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Mission creep watch
As Kevin Drum notes, our mission in Libya–ostensibly aimed at protecting civilians from Qaddafi’s regime–has become a bona fide intervention into a civil war. When this was being pitched as a humanitarian effort to protect civilians, it seemed unseemly to ask about the character of the rebels or the nature of the government they would…
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Depressing column of the week (month? year?)
Bob Herbert is leaving the NYT and goes out with a tour de force: So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life…
A Thinking Reed 