good and evil

The new Star Wars movie calls solo heroism into question—and offers a vision of communal goodness.

From the wise men to the wedding at Cana, joy comes from recognizing and affirming the good.

We need to study peace a lot harder than those who are studying war.

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.”

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.

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.