good and evil
The Last Jedi's theology of power
The new Star Wars movie calls solo heroism into question—and offers a vision of communal goodness.
Joy is for Epiphany, too
From the wise men to the wedding at Cana, joy comes from recognizing and affirming the good.
How evil wins, and how to beat it
We need to study peace a lot harder than those who are studying war.
by Samuel Wells
Evil religion?
At CNN’s Belief Blog, John Blake offers four warning signs of when religious beliefs become evil. These include absolutism, charismatic leaders, apocalypticism, and the end justifying the means. He notes that “the line between good religion and evil religion is thin, and it’s easy to make self-righteous assumptions.”
A few links about yesterday's bombing in Boston
When Ross Douthat's right, Ross Douthat's right:
What I hope we don’t see, when the next race or a parade or festival looms up in front of us, are layers of extra stops and searches and checkpoints, wider and wider rings of closed streets, the kind of portable metal detectors that journalists remember unfondly from political conventions, more of the concrete barriers that Washingtonians have become accustomed to around our public buildings … more of everything that organized officialdom does to reassure us, and itself, that soft targets can somehow be eliminated entirely, and that everything anyone can think of is being done to keep the unthinkable at bay.
All the bad people
This New York Times story would make for a good spot quiz in a Lutheran confirmation class. Identify the theological problem in the following report.
By David Heim