Conflating Powers and Markets
I love Jesus Manifesto. Among the Emergent types, Mark Van Steenwyk and his crew are the absolute top-shelf. They are anabaptists and flirt with anarchism. We like this. A lot. In a recent post Mark warns Emergents against becoming a mere fad, comercialized, and thus contributing to empire. A fair warning, especially considering the emergent […]
The Origins of Community
“American Christians don’t deal with paganism…” (Peter Leithart, First Things)
“Secularism is beginning to transform itself into an ideology that imposes itself through politics and that doesn’t concede a public space to the Catholic or Christian vision, which risks becoming purely private.” Pope Bendict XVI
I wonder whether Christians embrace the peculiarity of their ability to […]
Christianity and Gender
The world takes any differences among individuals and generates distinctions which can be manipulated into justifications for discrimination and rules for allocation of power.
The church ought to look upon our differences as manifestations of God from different perspectives.
I think God allows for hierarchy but not superiority. We recognize it within the godhead and He utilizes […]
Ethics Creeps In
Or maybe it’s the whole reason there is a conversation. Why do we care what happens to the economy? What difference does it make what the government does? Who says its wrong to advocate certain policies?
More specifically:
1. Why do people care about the poor? If they care so much, why don’t they do something about […]
Why Ethics Creeps In
Dani Rodrik challenges the dominant paradigm and says that:
We can get a lot of economic growth in a very poor institutional environment: formal institutions of property rights and contract enforcement are not always a binding constraint (just as lack of traffic lights does not prevent traffic from flowing smoothly in Vietnam)
This grates on the Austrian’s […]
What is Christianity?
Sojourners’ God’s Politics Blog inspired this comment:
You can tell whether a religion is close to Christianity by whether it rejects the use of force, and whether it marries itself to the state.
Most manifestations of Chirstiandom make the same errors that Islam does in these two respects. While affirming Jesus, they pick and chose among His […]
Cinderella and Income Inequality
I was watching Disney’s animated Cinderella with my daughters Christmas afternoon. Apart from the problems inherent to any fairy-tale, especially those involving a privileged royal class, I began wondering about the relevance of income inequality in this story. Cinderella lives in a large mansion with her evil stepmother and her two wicked stepsisters. She […]
Obviously the work of the state:
Yes, I’m wearing my Murray Rothbard: Enemy of the State T-shirt today, why do you ask?…
This woman was held by government authorities, shackled, and imprisoned for staying a few days late on a previous vacation to the US from Iceland. She came back recently to go shopping in New York. You can […]
Are My Ideas Just Utopian Dreams?
Well, of course they are. I don’t believe we will ever have a minarchist judicial-based government. I don’t believe we will even end welfare. I don’t think we will get rid of the Fed, and I hope we don’t build a 700 mile fence along the border with Mexico, but that’s not part of my […]
What Is Discipline?
GetReligion points us to this Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune article:
When Shawn Fraser’s discipline failed to rein in his 12-year-old son, he turned to his religion, taking a wooden paddle to Gerard’s upper thighs and posting Bible verses on the refrigerator, Fraser’s lawyer told the state Supreme Court on Wednesday.
And then asks what discipline is, […]