Robert George has a fascinating account of how Fr. Richard John Neuhaus went from being a celebrated liberal to a despised conservative. George calls him “the scourge of the post-60s liberals.” It’s a brilliant little essay, and you need to read it. Here are the first two paragraphs: ‘In the early 1970s, Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus was poised to become the nation’s next great liberal public intellectual—the Reinhold Niebuhr of his generation. He had going for him everything he needed to be not merely accepted but lionized by the liberal establishment.
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N. T. Wright and Divine Narcissism
I was struck by a paragraph in N. T. Wright’s new book on justification that reveals a stark difference between the perspective of Wright and that of John Piper. The passage appears in the midst of Wright’s argument against Piper’s belief that the righteousness of God should be defined as God’s concern for His own glory. I will quote Wright at length and then add some of my own reflections:
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Obama on Leno
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March Madness, Baby!
It’s March Madness time, and I have two items to share on this the first day of the 2009 NCAA tournament. First is my bracket. My final four is Memphis, Louisville, Pittsburg, and North Carolina. And I’m picking Louisville to win the whole shebang. Second is a YouTube of what is perhaps the greatest clutch play in NCAA Tournament history (even though I’m not a Duke fan). Laettner’s performance in this game was off-the-charts. He was 10 for 10 from the field, and scored this last minute game-winning shot. Though it is not remembered with fondness here in Kentucky, this was a game for the ages.
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Brian McLaren Comes to Louisville
Pastor Brian McLaren came to Louisville this week, and his appearance at the Presbyterian Seminary has made the local paper. McLaren appeared with Diana Butler Bass and Marcus Borg at the seminary’s annual Festival of Theology. There’s not really anything new here that we didn’t already know about McLaren, but it’s worth taking a look at the reporter’s description of what he said.
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A Faux Compromise on Same-sex ‘Marriage’
A couple of weeks ago, two law professors from Pepperdine University (Douglas W. Kmiec and Shelley Ross Saxer) asked the California State Supreme Court to consider a compromise position on the issue of gay marriage (read the article here). The court was reviewing the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California, and Kmiec and Saxer came up with an idea that they thought would please all sides. Essentially, their idea comes down to this.
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Editorial Critiques Obama’s Stem Cell Policy
The editors at the Washington Post are holding President Obama’s feet to fire concerning his broad support for embryonic stem cell research. They say that Obama cannot rely on scientists for answers to moral questions: “This is in large part an ethical question. Mr. Obama is right to turn to scientists for advice on the matter, but he should not hide behind them in making the ultimate decision.” Read the rest here.
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Calvinism Changing the World
According to TIME magazine, Calvinism is one of the top “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now,” ranking at number 3. Here’s the list.
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Obama and ‘Laboratory Plantations’
Yesterday I wrote about President Obama’s executive order that forces tax-payers to fund the destruction of innocent human life. Today, Ben Mitchell comments on the irony that President Obama would be the one to give this order. He writes: “If anyone should see the irony in all this it should be the nation’s first African-American president. Of all people, he should know the lessons of our history. The consequences are disastrous when one group of human beings is regarded as less than human in order to serve what other people think is the greater good. American chattel slavery certainly served the ‘greater good’ of those plantation owners in the South.
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Destroying Human Life at Tax-payers’ Expense
Today, President Barack Obama signed an executive order lifting the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Let’s be clear about what this means. Tax-payers will now be forced to pay for research that destroys innocent human life in its earliest stages. You wouldn’t have known what was at stake had you listened to President Obama’s remarks today just before he signed the order. In fact, you wouldn’t even have known that human life was on the line at all. Here is the justification that President Obama gave for signing what amounts to a death-warrant for embryonic human life.