Leadingchurch.com

Conversation starts around minute 30. Following Mark John Reynolds on Lupita Nyong’o’s Oscar speech and the follow up. This is a hobby horse for Phil and Skye challenges him.

The Barna movie link

Jesus Creed Here’s a list. Click through for details

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Jesus Creed RJS

The point being made in this clip is that the scientific definition of randomness does not imply that something is is open-ended and purposeless. The evolutionary process is an efficient search algorithm optimizing for specific functions. In fact, the evolutionary process follows well defined roads and paths constrained by the nature of chemistry and physics. Not everything is possible, there are a limited number of possible solutions, stable points in biological space. There is no reason to conclude that evolution demonstrates that we are accidents of nature.

Dreher, he links to Sullivan and you can retrace back from there.

And Douthat joins in, or rather he started it. 

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/5430/full HT: The Dish

But where do our ideas about the meaning of liberty come from? This is the topic addressed by Larry Siedentop in his erudite and elegantly-written Inventing the Individual. No doubt to the dismay of many, Siedentop’s thesis is that our modern understanding of human agency, and therefore of the liberty of the individual, has its roots deep in the moral intuitions of Christianity.  Continue reading →

The week

That’s why the premier liberal virtue is toleration and not recognition. Toleration is perfectly compatible with — indeed, it presupposes — a lack of unanimity, or even majority consensus, about ultimate goods. It leaves the diversity of views about ultimate goods intact, forcing consensus on as few issues as possible, so that people belonging to specific regions, classes, ethnicities, and sociocultural and religious groups can build rich, meaningful lives together in freedom.

That’s recognition’s goal: to stamp out rival visions of the good when they stand in the way of unconditional acceptance.

And that brings me to the sloppy way the most strident gay-marriage proponents have been throwing around the term “bigotry.” A bigot is someone closed-minded in some respects — someone who evaluates or judges certain groups of people on the basis of prejudice, or pre-judgment, about them, who does not greet all people and ways of life with complete and unbiased openness. Someone, in other words, who does not grant automatic recognition and unconditional affirmation to everyone.

Dreher follows contra Sullivan