Even the Devils Believe

I must say, I loved Jim West’s bombastic response to this Stanley Hauerwas quote:
I assume most of you are here because you think you are Christians, but it is not all clear to me that the Christianity that has made you Christians is Christianity. For example: How many of you worship in a church with [...]

In the last four months, my state has exonerated three former death row inmates — that’s not a commutation of their sentences but outright exonerations. The state could no longer make a meaningful case against them in court. Charges against the third, Bo Jones, will be dropped today. The case has fallen apart [...]

I was trying to think how I might respond to this disheartening NYT article about the discrimination faced by atheist soldiers in the American military:
When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.
But minutes into the [...]

The New York Times is running a long article detailing the campaign against non-Orthodox churches throughout Russia. Things have been difficult for Protestants and Catholics in Russia for some time, but recently they’ve gotten much, much worse:
Here in Stary Oskol, 300 miles south of Moscow, the police evicted a Seventh-day Adventist congregation from its [...]

Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center has penned a very thought-provoking response to the controversy surrounding Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I strongly recommend you take a look at the whole thing, but here are a few critical paragraphs:
One article I saw last week said that Jeremiah Wright was saying nothing different [...]

Despite the title, this is not a profound discourse on church/state relations. Just a funny little bit of liturgical arcana I found while reading Archimandrite Robert Taft’s excellent Liturgy of the Hours in East and West…
Taft describes that the Assyro-Chaldean Divine Office is one of the few that to this day maintains the full “cathedral” [...]

The kidnappers of Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho let him die yesterday without medication and recently told the Church in that country where to find his body.
The Church in Iraq has been under near-constant attack since we “liberated” the country, with attacks stepped up in the last two years or so. The United States and [...]

Although I have significant disagreements with the Roman Catholic Church, I’m always happy to highlight stuff they do right — and they do a lot right. In particular, they get a rap for being antiquated and behind the times, conservative out of mere inertia. That is true on some issues, in some places, [...]

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today leaving a political rally in Rawalpindi. The people of Pakistan could use all our prayers now as the country is plunged into mourning and violence just a few days before elections.
If I can be forgiven for making a philosophical point related to this terrible news — [...]

Pam’s House Blend has posted an account of a Navy SERE (Search, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) instructor about waterboarding, — the technique the President’s current nominee for Attorney General can’t say is or isn’t torture. Malcolm Nance, author of the op-ed, has a clearer answer:
I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds [...]