Matthew Franck Michael Klarman’s history of the push for same-sex marriage shows just how recently it’s developed and how its leaders lack substantive arguments for the nature and purpose of marriage itself. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/01/7495/?utm_source=RTA+Franck+Klarman+Review&utm_campaign=winstorg&utm_medium=email Read more

Dexter Van Zile New English Review A troubling reality is that Christian intellectuals, theologians and leaders in the Middle East, Europe and North America have done very little to confront Muslim hostility toward non-Muslims in the Middle East and the rest of the world. Aside from promoting the value of martyrdom and touting the importance of the Christian presence in the Middle East, they simply have no game on either a theological, intellectual or practical level. No game at all.... Read more

David Brooks This sounds fine in the abstract, but when you actually witness somebody in the act of not suffering fools gladly, it looks rotten. Once I watched a senior member of the House of Representatives rip into a young reporter after she nervously asked him an ill-informed question. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/opinion/brooks-suffering-fools-gladly.html?hpw Read more

Soloveitchik acknowledges the doctrine of Original Sin, and incorporates it at length into his philosophy of the nature of man. The Original Sin, is important not because it separates man from God (as it is in Christianity), but because it presents an alternate view of God, a demonic God-a gnostic reality. http://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/rabbi-soloveitchk-on-original-sin/ Read more

Any honest analysis of the Newtown tragedy must address the social problems caused by divorce, absent fathers, and the burdens of single motherhood. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/01/7488/ Read more

Pornography, like alcohol and drugs, weakens our ability to endure the kinds of suffering that are necessary for us to direct our lives properly. In particular, it reduces our capacity to tolerate those two ambiguous goods, anxiety and boredom. http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/12/26/why-we-should-limit-internet-pornography/?mod=WSJ_article_outbrain&obref=obnetwork Read more

Thomas Johnson God can repeal or at least postpone the proclaimed judgment if people repent. http://www.wrfnet.org/c/document_library/get_file?folderId=20&name=DLFE-176.pdf Read more

In the darkest hours of the Holocaust, the safest place for Jews in occupied Europe may have been the southern French hamlet of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Inspired by the town’s Huguenot (that is, French-Protestant) pastor, the residents collaborated in the war’s best-organized and largest-scale rescue operation, hiding and saving the lives of some 5,000 Jews. The Huguenot connection was hardly an incidental detail in this story. Rather, it marked a high point in a long history of Huguenot affinity with the... Read more

How little has changed in 500 years. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a born-and-baptized daughter of an East German Lutheran pastor, clearly believes the age-old moral virtues and remedies are the best medicine for the euro crisis. She has no desire to press a secular ideology, let alone an institutional religious faith, on her country, but her politics draws unmistakably from an austere and self-sacrificing, yet charitable and fair, Protestantism. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/opinion/sunday/in-euro-crisis-germany-looks-to-martin-luther.html?_r=0 Read more

The role of religion in the United States is characterized by a paradox. On the one hand, this is by any measure the most religious country among Western democracies, not only in terms of individual beliefs and behavior, but also in the public sphere. On the other hand, the US has an unusually strict separation of religion and the state, dwarfing France’s laicite (where the state pays the salaries of teachers in Catholic schools) and its imitators in Kemalist Turkey... Read more