Oliver O’Donovan has just released a book that provides a classic illustration of why the moderate and progressive segments of the Anglican communion in the UK, Canada, and the US are all sick unto death. At the same time, he has done good work before this — in The Desire of Nations, for example. And …
Late to the Party, As Usual
The Church of England, as usual, is late to the party. In a masterpiece of bad timing, when the intellectual establishment has finally been rocked back on its heels by serious questions about the viability of Darwinism, questions that won’t go away, and die-hard adherents of the Darwinian old-timey religion have had to resort to …
The Politics of Blood
From the interview with Charles Gibson, it appears that Sarah Palin is entirely on board with John McCain’s foreign policy — a foreign policy that I am not on board with. I am not a neocon, and I have no sympathy with the broader neocon objectives, which can be described as a democratic and secular …
Barak Was a Great Warrior
One of the things revealed in many of the comments for these posts on Sarah Palin is that certain subtexts of what “every Christian knows” are quite prevalent, and they do a fine job in controlling the narratives that we try to tell or try to read. One of these is the shared assumption that …
Red State Readers
This is really cool. Amazon has a map up that shows America in its familiar red state/blue state guise, only this time the calculations are based, not on votes, but on book purchases. That map can be found here. The results are pretty surprising.
The Creation Order and Sarah
Earlier today I had a conversation with a good friend about an underlying principle in all this talk about Sarah Palin, women in politics, Deborah as judge, and so on, and we agreed on an important principle. This is the kind of thing that should go without saying, but in these deranged times, almost nothing …
Sarah Palin, Candidate of Peace?
Let me begin by acknowledging that the globe is a complicated place, and that when vexing questions get insulted with answers that are too facile, then those answers should be rejected for being, um, too facile. At the same time, when certain errors (especially in economics) are almost universally embraced, the results are consistently the …
John Has Slain His Thousands
I am continuing all this in the spirit of thinking out loud. It should be obvious — even though I still have not made up my mind finally — that I really like Sarah Palin and believe that she might be uniquely positioned (in just a couple months) to really do something about Roe. Here …
The Word vs. Special Effects
“While the Renaissance careened after the image, the Reformation became a predominately word-based movement . . . the real religious fervor and intellectual power pulled to the north, so that England, Scandinavia, and Germany became the realm of the word, and the south returned to spectacle” (Arthur Hunt, The Vanishing Word, p. 78).
An Epistemological Pileup
All right. As far as I can make out, our debate over Sarah Palin revolves around three distinct issues, all three of which have merged in a highly entertaining and jumbled fashion — a sort of epistemological pile-up. The first is the propriety of voting for a Republican. A large number of us (myself included) …