I have been viewing the DVD for the just released DVD of the first season of Picket Fences, which I consider among my favorite TV shows of all time. I remember many church folks lauding its willingness to engage in topics often avoided by entertainment media. I just saw the “Christmas” episode from that first season, and I noticed now, Continue Reading
I hope anyone reading here will recognize that I am not a “Democratic supporter”, unless you call casting a vote for what generally amounts to “The lesser of two evils” an endorsement. After hearing the “faith forum” on CNN, I was not encouraged. As long as that entity known as the “public square” remains as tied to so called “rules Continue Reading
Dan with some more excellent stuff on Paul. I think that perhaps my next set of theological reading must be on Paul (I have two books in my stack, one by Harink –which I think I will like most, and one by Crossan that has a lot of archeological and socio-political background. I anticipate that I will feel similar to Dan Continue Reading
Here’s some links to Gore’s appearance on All Things Considered. Al Gore: ‘The Assault on Reason’ in America All Things Considered, May 25, 2007 · You would be forgiven if you confused Al Gore’s book signings for campaign events — with overflow crowds and a stream of will-he-or-won’t-he questions. One thing is for sure: The former vice president turned Continue Reading
The review I quoted in my previous post closes with this “conclusion” that this book is “angry” and “blistering” while An Inconvenient Truth was “accessible” and somehow NOT “blistering”. I wonder how much of An Inconvenient Truth this reviewer actually watched. And I have to just shake my head at political analysis that treats any harsh reactions to the Bush Continue Reading
NYTimes has a good review of Gore’s new book. I had said earlier, just as people had begun reacting to the book upon its release, that it doesn’t require “political aspirations” to be sufficiently offended at the Bush administration enough to write a book. And yet for all its sharply voiced opinions, “The Assault on Reason†turns out to be less Continue Reading
No surprise, but I am always amazed when I hear things like this. What utter darkness these people have accepted as “light”, so totally unaware that they have failed to recognize those who posture themselves as “light” and then proceed to sow darkness and “inflict freedom” and get away with it by calling it freedom and hiding “freedom’s consequences to Continue Reading
With all the critique I give of the idolatry of “our democracy”, and how “America” and it’s “ideals” are elevated to deity status, I actually have some sense of confidence in “what this country CAN be”; but it has grown increasingly hard to feel confident that our “politics” is much more than lipservice to those “ideals”, and very little to Continue Reading
My previous post about Olbermann’s comments was trying to articulate a “that’s good but not quite there” kind of reaction I had, very similar to the reaction I have to a lot of media people whose stuff I tend to read and to like, such as Bill Moyers, William Carroll, Frank Rich, Seymour Hersh, Ron Suskind, and Jon Stewart. Keith Continue Reading
Darn it! My mail notification for comments is not working again! (update: well, yeah it did work. What happened was that my Outlook at work checks two of my home mail accounts and removes them from the server, so my home Outlook didn’t store it. I see the notification in my Outllook account at work under that folder into which Continue Reading
Weigel goes on and on and raises points like this that make one wonder how he keeps arguing for the “justness” of the Iraq war; this recognition of the “primary failure [comprehensive blueprint]” would seem to disqualify the initial “go-ahead” for the operation in March 2003. Many many voices were warning against this for this very reason. Colin Powell was Continue Reading
This is the direction Wiegel leans with this fantastic “observation”: Yet, he concedes, it’s not completely beyond the realm of moral and political possibility that “a misguided military intervention or a preventive war fought before its time might nonetheless end with the displacement of a brutal regime and the construction of a decent one.†Wiegel suggests that “even if we Continue Reading
Continued amazement at the utter capitulation on of this “theologian” to secular bastardizations of just war theory. The secular just-war theorist Michael Walzer has been proposing for some years that there is another leg, so to speak, on the just-war stool: a ius post bellum (as Walzer styles it), a set of moral criteria for defining the peace to be Continue Reading
I found the article to which my previous post on Cavanaugh’s article refers, and this guy is some theological tool. For instance: Just-war thinking, as Johnson reminded us, is not only about the justification of the resort to armed force or the ways in which that force is deployed. Just-war thinking also includes a serious moral analysis of the goal Continue Reading
William Cavanaugh on God’s Politics blog: Weigel would have the church effectively abdicate its moral judgment in matters of war to the leaders of the nation-state. It is hard to imagine what could do greater damage to both church and nation. If the church does not have an independent process of discernment to bring the gospel to bear on matters Continue Reading