blip : Being Lonely In Paradise :

This week is wedding planning week for me. That means I can’t take to time for some substantive engagements with all the interesting stuff on the web these days. Instead, here’s a couple links to some great reads.

First, check out Eric Lee’s piece on Stanley Hauerwas. Eric gives us a great window into Hauerwas’ political vision for the church while confronting some critics of Hauerwas with some overlooked texts: Engagements between Hauerwas and the nation-state. If you want the check out my particpation in that conversation, check out these posts: the excess of stanley hauerwas and Steve Bush and Stanley Hauerwas.

There’s a short piece that appeared in the International Herald Tribune last week that highlights how important the secular tradition, not Christianity, is for the war-making of Britain’s Tony Blair and the USA’s George Bush: The twisted religion of Blair and Bush, by Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst. Here’s a random excerpt from the article:

The usurpation of the great faiths by secular ideology is not usually recognized. This process has a historical and a contemporary dimension. For all the major monotheistic faiths, their primary historical distortion lies with their utilization for the purposes of state formation and nationalism.