Religion in the Public Square, Literally

This post was originally intended for the Dialogical Coffee House, as a long update to my original post there about the arguments before the Supreme Court yesterday regarding the legality of the display of the Ten Commandments in public spaces. Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick has weighed in on this afternoon’s arguments about the public display of […]

Pittsburghers Take Note

Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick has covered the opening arguments in Kelo v New London. The case, in a nutshell: the city of New London wishes to seize, via eminent domain, private property to sell to private developers to create a new upscale community. Problem is, the current properties are not blighted (the usual criteria for ED), […]

Dooyeweerd

Our church’s coffee group (I can’t seem to settle on a name for our little tribe, since our reading material doesn’t stick to a single genre or theme) met last night to chat about the first chapter of Herman Dooyeweerd‘s Roots of Western Culture. Dooyeweerd was one of the driving intellectual forces in Neocalvinism, and […]

New Urbanism

Eli passed along information today about Prospect, Colorado’s first New Urbanist community. Viewed under a microscope, it is a very cool looking place — well-designed houses, a community business district with home-grown businesses, trees and parks. But, when viewed as a part of a whole, the project seems to seems to fail at one of […]

The Mother of Objectivism

Reason‘s Cathy Young explores the philosophy and person of Ayn Rand nearly twenty five years after her death. I must admit, I was enchanted when I read The Fountainhead, and that led, in part, to my brief affair with Libertarianism. But as Young points out, Rand had no time for compassion, and not everyone who […]

The New Global Left

Gideon Strauss has started about the new Left he envisions as a future for Christians in politics. Crooked Timber posted a link to this book review by Tony Judt examing the political divide between Europe and America, with coffee as a central metaphor. A couple of interesting bits: To a growing number of Europeans, however, […]

Christians Fighting for Liberty (of all kinds)

Christian lawyers in the ACLU? This is interesting, and presents a potential dilemma for Christian lawyers. I guess my first question would be — can a Christian work at the ACLU and work strictly within the religious liberty department? I assume there could be cases would could require a Christian to work for something that […]

Reforming Capitalism

Reading: Capitalism and Progress by Bob Goudzwaard. The book traces the foundations of capitalism through the philosophical trends beginning with the Renaissance. I’m not through the book yet, so: a) don’t ruin it for me. b) if I assume too much on the part of Goudzwaard, don’t be too upset at me. What has been […]

Something to Look Forward To

Antithesis has an interesting splash page at the moment, and I love their warning at the very bottom.

Public Intellectuals and the Neocalvinist Tradition

Gideon Strauss has opened a great discussion about the current crop of public intellectuals and his desire to see three (!) neocalvinists on the list in the very near future. The discussion is well worth a look.