Even the Devils Believe

Via the young fogey, a great article on Common Dreams about Erasmus and the war in Iraq. Erasmus is a favorite of mine — his Praise of Folly is loyal criticism (of the church, in this case, and church-people especially) at its best.
The article concerns Erasmus’ On the Turkish War, and there are some very [...]

I’m busier than usual today, though it’s a good, productive kind of busy. So I’m just going to send you over to Rachel’s to read her post On liturgy and ambiguity. It’s great stuff. I particularly like this Kathleen Norris quote about the Office and doubt:
When I first stumbled upon the Benedictine abbey [...]

Lately I have been reading More Than Chains and Toil: A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women, a masterful exploration of the work ethic of antebellum black women arising “from the chains, but unchained from slavery’s meaning” by Episcopal Divinity School professor and PCUSA minister Joan M. Martin. During this Pentecost week, there was [...]

The Washington Monthly has posted a powerful video performance of Twain’s “The War Prayer” (full text here), narrated by Peter Coyote and illustrated by Akis Dimitrakopoulos.

(Part two is here on YouTube.)
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
Heaven forbid.

I bookmarked this interview with Jon Stewart on Bill Moyers’ new show about a month ago, but I only got around to watching it recently. It’s definitely worth paying attention to. Stewart is one of our most articulate critics of the absurdity of the present political system and especially the way the media [...]

Peter Steinfels has a compelling interview with Fr Gary Dorrien in the Saturday New York Times that’s worth reading. (Biretta tip: Philocrites.) Dorrien is the new Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union in New York, and Steinfels talks to him about Niebuhr at length. Dorrien describes where he is located with [...]

I just finished watching the very disturbing documentary Deliver Us from Evil, which explores the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church by looking at the specific case of Oliver O’Grady, a former priest who was a serial abuser, who was enabled in his abuse by Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles while he was [...]

So I’ve been prevailed upon to do Friday cat blogging a little more often by some of my brothers and sisters in the ICCC and the Augustinians. It was a regular thing on Progressive Protestant, but I haven’t done it very regularly here. I don’t mind, though.
It has been a [...]

There’s been kind of a lull in my reading lately as a lot of aspects of my life (work, church, spiritual life) have been exceedingly busy. I’m starting to get back to my groaning bookshelves, and hopefully blogging on theological topics will pick up again in the next few weeks.
Over the weekend, as I [...]

In this post a couple of months ago, I wrote about Jeffrey Stout’s recent article, “The Spirit of Democracy and the Rhetoric of Excess,” a response to Stanley Hauerwas among others. Stout is one of Hauerwas’s most trenchant critics, and I don’t think Stanley has responded to Democracy and Tradition very convincingly.
Anyhow, the fulltext of [...]