Mercy … My dear son, I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today. I suppose that I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the purpose of an education is to enable one to develop a community of interest with his fellow men, to learn to know them, and to learn how to get along with them. In order to do this, of... Read more
Joe Carter covers a story up in Milwaukee at my friend’s, Mel Lawrenz’s, church: I got this for the judge; maybe he appreciates the potency of aesthetics. Carter thinks it exemplifies activist judges. The Story: The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that holding a public school graduation in a church violates the Establishment Clause when the church has an indeterminate number of religious icons and symbolism in the building. The Background: The court ruled inDoe v. Elmbrook School District that a high school... Read more
I don’t move in circles where dominion theology is at work, but many today are deeply concerned about the rise of dominion theology – or Christian Reconstructionism – and one such person is Paul C. McGlasson and he has written No! A Theological Response to Christian Reconstructionism to describe it and respond to it – with finesse, charity and clarity. Are you seeing dominion theology? Where? Are you concerned? What do you think is the best response to dominion theology? But... Read more
This post, by my friend in Perth, Michael O’Neil, is about an excellent book on how Baptists read the Bible. Michael teaches at Vose Seminary, and is an engaging, fun-loving, devoted theologian who finds particular fascination with Karl Barth. One feature in the excellent collection of essays from The “Plainly Revealed” Word of God? is an emphasis on christocentric interpretation of Scripture. Thus Christopher Ellis writes, Just as the early church read the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus... Read more
From USA Today: Asian Americans are “the fastest-growing race group, and they are bringing with them a diversity of faiths,” says Cary Funk, senior researcher for Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, which released the report today. The survey of 3,511 adults, conducted in English and seven Asian languages, was large enough to establish data about the six largest groups: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. Key findings: (more…) Read more
From Mark Edmundson: But can online education ever be education of the very best sort? It’s here that the notion of students teaching teachers is illuminating. As a friend and fellow professor said to me: “You don’t just teach students, you have to learn ’em too.” It took a minute — it sounded like he was channeling Huck Finn — but I figured it out. With every class we teach, we need to learn who the people in front of... Read more
Some Christians do treat the Bible as a lawbook (I wrote about this in Blue Parakeet) and in Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity a challenge was given to treating the Bible as a constitution. By which Brian mostly meant a lawbook, but I have been reading Jack Balkin’s book, Living Originalism (Harvard, 2011), and I wonder if treating the Bible as our “constitution” is a problem. To begin with, “constitution” is more than a lawbook. (And Brian focuses on the legal... Read more
Darwin unleashed a new kind of science, if I may call it that; his theories have been taken up, expanded, proven to be true, adjusted, refashioned, etc, over time to the kind of science we have today. Intelligent Design folks, led by people like Michael Behe, contend Darwinian science is lacking and, in fact, they are proposing a different kind of science. Their science contends that some elements of nature — like the vertebrate immune system, blood-clotting cascade, and the... Read more
This is from a 1995 NYReview of Books piece by Garry Wills. In American law, the right to bear arms, originally about the military, has been extended and expanded to the right of every citizen to own, use and even publicly display a gun. There are other possible (though less plausible) reasons for the omissions—e.g., to prevent tautology. What is neither warranted nor plausible is Halbrook’s certitude that these words were omitted deliberately to preclude militia-language. The whole context of the amendment was always... Read more
This social scientist, Patrick Egan, documents improvement on violence and gun laws … Which proves that, though perhaps the worst in the civilized world, we’re doing better. Is that good enough? But as pundits and politicians react, they would do well to keep in mind two fundamental trends about violence and guns in America that are going unmentioned in the reporting on Aurora. First, we are a less violent nation now than we’ve been in over forty years. In 2010, violent... Read more
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