With the recent start of Mad Men’s fifth season, the critics have been piling praise high and deep for a show that as much as I watch leaves me cold. The reviewer for Terry Gros’ Fresh Air gassed on about the show’s finely textured characters. Puh-leeze. This seemed like a desperate attempt by a university… Read More→
Thanks to our Inside-the-Beltway (THE Beltway!) correspondent comes this recent piece from Martin Marty. Below is an excerpt but the entire article is available here. A Gentile (as in Russell P. Gentile) is the most recent, perhaps most earnest, certainly the boldest claimant, on the government and religion news front in the winter just past.… Read More→
Before all of the anti-dualists and despisers of otherworldliness get riled up, the point of this post is not for evangelicals or any kind of Christian to abdicate their duties as citizens. Instead, it is that injecting religion into politics has neither helped politics nor aided religion. Two recent confirmations of this come from Mikelmann’s… Read More→
John Frame’s book against the so-called Escondido theology (hereafter SCET) contains a chapter, “Is Natural Revelation Sufficient to Govern Culture?” It goes along with his bullet-point summary of the SCET’s political platform, which is as follows (edited by all about me): POLITICS/ETHICS • God’s principles for governing society are found, not in Scripture, but in… Read More→
Is it a coincidence that Rick Santorum, the former Senator from the virtuous commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has started to drop “w— v—” into his remarks this past week, a time when Grand Rapidians are deciding for whom to vote among the Republican contestants? First, Santorum questioned Obama’s w— v—. Then he attacked Obama’s plans to… Read More→
This week’s national holiday allowed the Gospel Coalition to don its patriotic colors and wave the flag of civil piety. A post by Thomas Kidd on the faith of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln took a fairly modest line by arguing that the first and sixteenth presidents were not orthodox Christians or even the best… Read More→
Actually, it is Peter Leithart offering up some Habermas with some Peter Gordon thrown in. The post concerns the burden that secular societies place upon religious citizens. Leithart quotes Habermas on the burdens that modern societies, in trying to bracket religious convictions, place upon both believers and secularists: Religious citizens who regard themselves as loyal… Read More→
Mikelmann has been on a roll lately as the GOP hopefuls have rolled through Iowa. The inconsistencies that evangelical faith and w— v— convictions place upon Iowa’s citizens and the Republican’s candidates is indeed staggering. It even shows how faith-based political engagement is seriously hurting the integrity of Christ’s followers. But apparently the stakes in… Read More→
I have been reading The New Republic since grad school days. It is not as good now as it was in the days when Andrew Sullivan was editor (and I don’t say this to pay him back for a mention of my book). Back then it was provocative, funny, and well written. Stephen Glass likely… Read More→
Now We’re Talking Christian Education
This comes from a recent review in The American Conservative of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (by Geoffrey Kabaservice). The author of the review is Jeff Taylor, who teaches political science at Dort College. Counterintuitive though it may be, the… Read More→