Back in the day, Lent was about what you didn’t do: eat candy, smoke, drink, whatever. And of course the three classic methods of keeping the Forty Days—fasting, intensified prayer, and almsgiving—retain their perennial significance. What I discovered three years ago, however, was that those practices come into clearer spiritual focus when they’re “located” within an understanding that Lent is the season when all of us—not just those who will be baptized or received into full communion with the Church... Read more

Conservatives who reject modern architecture have reasons to do so. Traditional architecture is predicated on the ideal of beauty as an objective reality, while modernism exalts subjective preferences. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/03/12441/?utm_source=The+Witherspoon+Institute&utm_campaign=b1de65eb40-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_15ce6af37b-b1de65eb40-84107317 Read more

Much of the controversy today is not precisely about religious freedom but is instead over matters of fact and truth. Abortion, homosexuality, genetic experimentation, and euthanasia are not primarily “religious” issues but rational ones. On these life issues, not a few religions have come to embrace what are, in effect, irrational “rights” that contradict reason. Therefore, “religious freedom” is really, at bottom, a philosophical and political issue because it pertains to what a reasonable politics can rightly allow. http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2014/03/statist-creed/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=309e7c861f-2014_3_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-309e7c861f-41159925 Read more

Sunday mornings at All Souls Charlottesville are fairly common for an Anglican congregation. The Book of Common Prayer and the Revised Common Lectionary are standard, creeds are spoken together, the Eucharist is the central focus of the liturgy and the minister blesses the congregation before it scatters back into the world. But the Charlottesville, Va., congregation isn’t an Episcopal church. It’s Baptist — in fact it’s a plant of the Baptist General Association of Virginia and is celebrating its fifth... Read more

The reason that government is likely to lose in the Hobby Lobby case, however, is that there are so many ways for the government to distribute these drugs—on its own exchanges, through the Title X family-planning program and by cooperating with willing distributors—that do not require the forced participation of conscientious objectors. That presumably is why an effort is now being made to cut back on the robust conception of religious freedom that once united Americans of all faiths and... Read more

Matthew J. Franck The project of perfect justice in which each of us is a “cell in the social body” is not within our grasp. Or is it? Aldous Huxley makes us think this question through again. The modern devotion to the mastery of nature — including the mastery of human nature — may make Socrates’ ironic project a horrifying possibility. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/brave-new-world-platos-republic-and-our-scientific-regime Read more

Trying to silence others because one fears what they might say is no way to learn. And it is no way for a university to be a university. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/03/12913/?utm_source=The+Witherspoon+Institute&utm_campaign=08c502deeb-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_15ce6af37b-08c502deeb-84107317 Read more

IN the future, it seems, there will be only one “ism” — Individualism — and its rule will never end. As for religion, it shall decline; as for marriage, it shall be postponed; as for ideologies, they shall be rejected; as for patriotism, it shall be abandoned; as for strangers, they shall be distrusted. Only pot, selfies and Facebook will abide — and the greatest of these will probably be Facebook. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-age-of-individualism.html Read more

Excellent opportunity for untenured professors and advanced grad students. April 15 application deadline. http://winst.org/centers/corac/seminars/church-and-state/?AID=11508282&PID=5827583&SID=CW191_20140215_380af28884e246608d12c38068253cab&pn=cj Read more

WHERE: Salem Baptist Church, 103 N Broad St, Salem, VA WHEN: 1-6 PM Saturday WHAT: Dr Rhys Bezzant, Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, author of JONATHAN EDWARDS AND THE CHURCH (Oxford University Press), speaking on Edwards as Mentor. Gerald McDermott, Roanoke College, co-author of THE THEOLOGY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS (OUP), speaking on what Edwards can teach pastors today. Read more