Sunday, November 18, 2007
A tale of revenge within the Shiite community in Iraq, from Jon Lee Anderson’s “Inside the Surge“:
Amar was a lifelong friend of Karim’s. Three months earlier, Amar and his older brother, Jafaar, had been riding in the van of a friend, Sayeed, when a group of gunmen hailed them. Amar recognized them as Mahdi Army [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
Two recent “Intelligence Briefs” from PINR caught my eye: “Iran’s Covert Operations in Iraq,” and “The Implications of Strategic Withdrawal from Iraq.” As some readers know, I’m a big fan of PINR for supplying ‘open source intelligence,’ which is to say, generalized insights into foreign policy and educated guesses based on publicly available information. In [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
Sam Harris has started another great debate over religion, this time with conservative author Andrew Sullivan. They’ve been fairly civil with each other, and what little upset there has been has arisen from the justifiable claims they both make about the intellectual honesty of theism. In other debates, Harris has been too civil with his [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
For a little more than ten years, from 1994 to 2005, Phil Agre produced the Red Rock Eater News Service, a collection links and commentaries (”notes and recommendations,” he called it) that he distributed via e-mail. Agre is a professor of information studies at UCLA, and my intellectual identity was partially formed while reading his [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
The simple truth is that such accumulation of earthly power is ruinous because it takes the eyes of good Christians “off the prize”. Perhaps you wonder what gives me the right to say what is good or bad for Christianity when so many religious leaders would disagree. Because Christianity is the religious faith of [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
BLDGBLOG recently interviewed Mike Davis. This quote, about the rise of Pentacostal Christianity in South America, fascinates me:
Frankly, one of the great sources of Pentecostalism’s appeal is that it’s a kind of para-medicine. One of the chief factors in the life of the poor today is a constant, chronic crisis of health and medicine. This [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
So in the last post, I showed how the initial versions of Christian judgment were remarkably modest and fallibilist with regard to other people. This makes a certain amount of sense, since Augustine was attached to a fairly rationalist theology, and always gave both doctrinal and basically ethical reasons for his judgments. (For instance, with [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
There’s a rumour going around, perpetuated by bumper stickers and politicians, that “God is pro-life.” It’s an interesting claim, and since everyone seems to want God (i.e. the heavy guns) on their side, I thought I’d examine it.
Michael Sandel, (yes, that Sandel) while working on the presidential Council on Bioethics, wrung this statement from [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
What I'm reading