Nate Knows Nada

Rest eternal grant unto her, O Lord. Let light perpetual shine upon her.

Technorati Tags: christianity, gay, public v. private, religion, weird

From over at Crooked TImber:

Today’s Boston Globe prints a really thoughtful piece by Charles Marsh on American evangelical Protestantism’s disunity with virtually the rest of Christianity.

From Pentecostals in Brazil to the Christian Councils of Ghana, from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East to the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, from Pope John Paul II to the The Waldensian Reformed Church of Italy and the Christian Conference of Asia, the voices of our brothers and sisters in the global ecumenical church spoke in unison.

Why did American evangelicals not pause for a moment in the rush to war to consider the near-unanimous disapproval of the global Christian community? The worldwide Christian opposition seems to me the most neglected story related to the religious debate about Iraq: Despite approval for the president’s decision to go to war by 87 percent of white evangelicals in April 2003, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts poll, almost every Christian leader in the world (and almost every nonevangelical leader in the United States) voiced opposition to the war.

Read more »

If you’re a regular reader in the academic blogosphere, you may have noticed that there are a fair number of blogs out there, either written by economists (and which present economic research) or that simply present the results of economic research that the general public might find accessible and interesting.

Henry Farrell has done those of us who study politics a favor by trying to get us to do some of the same. He’s started a blog that posts the abstracts and links to papers and articles that the average, educated reader might find interesting and thought-provoking.

I have no illusions that what we in the academy do has much, if any, effect on the vast majority of what goes on in this world, at least at the time we do it. But one of the failings of the American polity in the last 20 years or so has been a failure to imagine and envision the necessity of political engagement. And good research well-presented might be some small contribution toward showing how politics matters in every aspect of our lives, no matter how mundane it might seem on the surface.

Now for a shameless plug: How about highlighting my paper (previously published in a collection) on the political theory inhering in The West Wing?

Technorati Tags: academia, politics, political science, research, social science