Source BOSTON – The American Unitarian Association, peopled and powered by this city’s Brahmin elite, announced its presence here in 1886 with a grand and stately headquarters at the very top of Beacon Hill, right next door to the Statehouse. If anyone doubted the denomination’s might, its next move made it clear: In 1927, strapped for space, the Unitarians finished building a new home next to the capitol on the other side, even persuading the legislature to change the street’s numbering... Read more
Source The pastor of a Lansingburgh Baptist churchplans to give away an AR-15 assault rifle to the winner of a free raffle at an upcoming Sunday service. A provocative flier he distributed rallied supporters of gun rights and stirred controversy among anti-gun advocates and some who considered it un-Christian. The Rev. John Koletas, pastor of Grace Baptist Church, said the service and gun raffle are aimed at “honoring hunters and gun owners who have been so viciously attacked by the antichristian socialist media... Read more
In my annual commitment to (try to) read a novel, other than A Christmas Carol and Old Man and the Sea, I usually fail to get through the novel. Last year I tried Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and, well, didn’t get very far. A friend of ours, Katie Prudek, one evening convinced me I might be able to get through one of her favorite (short) novels, by one George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Silas Marner. So I got a copy and thought I’d give it... Read more
Bob Turner …If These Walls Could Talk… You probably haven’t heard of Paula Kaufman. She is a leader in her field. She is an American hero. She is a librarian. I know what you are thinking: sensible shoes, conservative attire, and bad hair. Or, maybe: rule-keeper who hates noise, food, drink, and gum. Once more: passive, timid, introverted, pseudo-academic. Getting colder. Kaufman was a librarian at Columbia University. In 1987, she received a request from the F.B.I., who was collecting... Read more
I’m looking for recommendations of four people (bloggers, website) who should review this book, and why you think they should get a free copy and review it (within one month) on their blog or website? Provide name and blogger (blog name, too), and why you think they should review it. “My kingdom is not of this world.” Followers of Jesus have been struggling to understand these words ever since he first uttered them—often in sharply contradictory ways. Today the inescapably political... Read more
Source In my Sunday column, I [Ross Douthat] wrote about the possible culture-war scenarios that await us once same-sex unions are recognized as marriages from sea to shining sea, and contemplated the kinds of pressure, legal and otherwise, that might be brought to bear against individuals and institutions that hew to the older understanding of matrimony. (This contemplation was occasioned by Jan Brewer’s veto of Arizona’s religious-liberty bill last week, which followed a massive and massively misleading media campaign against the legislation.)... Read more
A question that comes up quite frequently in discussions of evolution and Christian faith deals with the apparently purposeless randomness of the evolutionary process. One of the most famous images is the tape of time given by Stephen Jay Gould. Run the tape over and something entirely different will emerge. From his 1994 article in Scientific American (v. 271, pp. 84-91) The Evolution of Life: History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial... Read more
All traditional church confessions and bodies at some place affirm the “inspiration” of Scripture, but it is not always clear what that might mean when it comes to reading it or listening to it. Does it make the Bible unlike all other books in all ways? in some ways? and how so? Michael Graves has asked this set of questions and has sought to answer that same set of questions by exploring how the church fathers looked at the inspiration of Scripture (The... Read more
Source: The chart above demonstrates something else. Conservatives have a double problems with millennial voters. The first is that they’re much less white than older voters, which means that, as time goes on, Republicans would need to get much higher voting margins among millennial whites merely to stay even. But the second problem is that millennial whites have more liberal views than older whites. Support for smaller government polls in the +40-to-+50 range among Generation X and Baby Boomer whites,... Read more
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