Why do Arab Israeli Christians lobby for a new identity? http://forward.com/articles/208168/culture-dispute-is-all-aramaic-to-us Read more

Stephen Webb The debate, in other words, is between Schleiermacher and Newman. For Schleiermacher, theologians should hover above ossified religious traditions by perching on the precarious edge of daring creativity. For Newman, prudence alone should lead any theologian to conclude that private fancy is not enough to sustain theological discourse. Schleiermacher advocates for virtuosity, Newman for anonymity. For Schleiermacher, the theologian should be the public face of the Church, in the sense of being visibly involved in accepting the challenges... Read more

RR Reno I’m sure Pius XII would have denied that signing a Concordat with Hitler’s Germany meant he approved of Nazism. But it conferred legitimacy and dramatically undercut any basis within the Church for resistance. The same goes for the concordat many Catholic institutions are signing with gay marriage. It confers legitimacy on the sexual revolution and undercuts resistance. http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/11/catholic-capitulation-on-marriage Read more

These stories are unpleasant.  But then so were the stories in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which many Christians criticized for being too graphic.  If we are to pray for the suffering Church, we must become aware of its suffering. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4817/muslim-persecution-of-christians-june Read more

Much is being made of evangelical ethicist David Gushee’s announcement that he now thinks same-sex practice can be as Christian as married heterosexual sex.  Jonathan Merritt celebrates it at Religious News Service, where Gushee is said to lament, “I am truly sorry that it took me so long to come into full solidarity with the Church’s own most oppressed group.” Really?  The Church’s most oppressed group? (more…) Read more

McWhorter is defending a liberal, universalist view of humanity. Human experience, he argues, is culturally, not linguistically, determined, and culture is more flexible than language. http://forward.com/articles/207803/political-correctness-doesn-t-make-speech-more-m Read more

I’m appalled by what is done in the name of my religion.  Yet my American friends don’t want to hear about it. http://online.wsj.com/articles/aly-salem-lets-talk-about-how-islam-has-been-hijacked-1414365802   Read more

Mark Tooley Trying to stride way ahead of the next wave, I’m proposing a new form of identity claim for which I have a special affinity: transchronology. It will refuse confinement to any particular time and place. Transchronologists, or transchrons for short, move effortlessly across history and cultures, claiming who they really are, in an era and place suitable to them. http://juicyecumenism.com/2014/10/23/transgender-therian-transchron/?utm_source=flocknote&utm_medium=email&utm_term=3&utm_content=transgender-therian-transchron&utm_campaign=Weekly%20Wrap%20Up%2010-24-2014 Read more

Reuel Marc Gerecht Despite the best efforts of Western or Western-inspired modernizers, everywhere in the Middle East, for everyone, religion is the primary identity—cherished and nurtured by fundamentalists and the common faithful or constrained, submerged, and coopted by nationalists and secularists. http://m.weeklystandard.com/articles/sandstorm_808491.html?nopager=1 Read more

Only at religious colleges will the humanities find a broad market. It is no accident that Deresiewicz repeatedly and self-consciously collapses into a pious vocabulary that he would prefer to avoid: “Though I’m not religious, I find that only religious language has sufficient gravity to do these questions justice.” http://chronicle.com/article/Sanctuary-for-the-Humanities/149273/ Read more