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McLaren and the mainline
A while ago I posted about the controversy over Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. I noted that it seemed McLaren and his critics were recapitulating a battle waged over a century ago between Christian modernists and fundamentalists. This review of McLaren’s book in the Christian Century seems to confirm that hunch: The central…
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Property and justice
My earlier post wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive critique of libertarianism, but one interesting issue that came up in the comment thread was the justice of initial property acquisition. Libertarianism, at least in its natural-rights form, says that holdings in property are just if they are the result of just initial acquisition and voluntary…
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Emancipation Day
D.C. observes April 16th as Emancipation Day. From Wikipedia: On that day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act for the release of certain persons held to service or labor in the District of Columbia. The Act freed about 3,100 enslaved persons in the District of Columbia nine months before President Lincoln…
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Rights, liberties, and taxation
A point that I’ve tried to make before, but which may bear repeating since it’s Tax Day: the distinction between “positive” and “negative” rights, or liberty, is largely illusory–or at least not that important. Libertarians sometimes use this distinction to differentiate their position from “welfare” liberals. In the libertarian utopia, rights are guarantees against interference…
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Red Toryism revisited
Philosopher and political gadfly John Gray has what seems to be a balanced take on Philip Blond’s “Red Toryism,” which has been making waves in politico-theological circles. Blond is an acolyte of John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy and an advisor to British Tory leader David Cameron who proposes a program of economic “relocalization” combined with political…
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McLaren’s “heresy”
I’ve never read anything by Brian McLaren, but the dust-up in some evangelical circles about his new book A New Kind of Christianity is interesting for what it reveals about the presuppositions of at least significant swaths of American evangelicalism. Nothing McLaren says, at least going by the summary offered in the story linked above,…
A Thinking Reed 