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March 22, 2007

Enough religious “Beyondism”

John Armstrong’s thoughtful post below reminds me of the critiques of Jim Wallis offered in this space, here, here, and here (by Armstrong himself). And over at FirstThings today, Joseph Bottum, courtesy of David Brooks, gives me a term that I hadn’t encountered and that serves well as a moniker for the phenomenon Wallis embodies: “beyondism.” Continue Reading...
March 22, 2007

Thanks, but no thanks?

Non-evangelicals and progressive Christians continue to throw their support Rev. Richard Cizik’s way. Now the Institute for Progressive Christianity has released a statement commending “the courage and Christian concern displayed by Rev. Continue Reading...
March 22, 2007

Christianity and communism in China

Kishore Jayabalan reported yesterday on the latest happenings with the Acton Institute’s office in Rome and the most recent installment of the Centesimus Annus Conference Series, “The Religious Dimension of Human Freedom.” Continue Reading...
March 21, 2007

Coming soon to your neighborhood bookseller: Al Gore’s Assault on Reason

Oh, I’m sorry. I messed up that title. Gore’s newest book will be called The Assault on Reason. Here’s the book description from Amazon.com: A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason… …We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate’s thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Continue Reading...
March 21, 2007

Censuring Sobrino

When the Vatican last week issued a stinging rebuke of Fr. Jon Sobrino, a noted proponent of Liberation Theology, predictable complaints ensued about the Church squelching “dissent.” However, as Samuel Gregg points out, Fr. Continue Reading...
March 21, 2007

Church and state: do you serve two masters?

Last week, Acton’s Rome office, Istituto Acton, held a conference entitled “The Religious Dimension of Human Freedom” at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. (See this Zenit piece for a brief, if unexciting, summary of the event.) Continue Reading...
March 20, 2007

Google minds the gaps in statistical analysis

Google recently announced that it has purchased the Trendalyzer software from Gapminder, a Swedish non-profit (HT: Slashdot). Trendalyzer is the brain-child of professor Hans Rosling, who was lecturing on international development “when it struck him that statistics were an underexploited resource, often presented in an incomprehensible fashion. Continue Reading...
March 19, 2007

“The university is totally ignoring diversity of thought”

Coming soon to a theater near you (hopefully) – Evan Coyne Maloney’s Indoctrinate U. From the film’s website: At colleges and universities across the nation, from Berkeley and Stanford to Yale and Bucknell, the charismatic filmmaker uncovers academics who use classrooms as political soapboxes, students who must parrot their professors’ politics to get good grades, and administrators who censor diversity of thought and opinion. Continue Reading...