Some belated aggregating

I've had some webpages bookmarked for a while now to share with my vast worldwide audience, so it's well past time for me to clear out the backlog. If these articles share a theme, it's that they each introduced me to new arguments which made me think more deeply on a topic than I had before.

While the Presbyterian Church in America lacks a denominational magazine, they have a close substitute in the byFaith website. "Prisoners in the Pew" documents how some congregations are working to uncover and remediate domestic abuse of all sorts. It provides food for thought for sessions of all presbyterian traditions.

"Prejudice and the Blaine Amendments" was published a few weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court released its decision in Trinity Lutheran of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer. (This is the playground resurfacing case.) Philip Hamburger does admirable historiographical work to demonstrate that amendments to state constitutions which now appear to have been intended to require government neutrality in religious matters were in fact designed to institutionalize the then-dominant forms of liberal cultural Christianity. In our day, that has effectively morphed into the institutionalization of an anti-ecclesial bias.

In a two-part review of the book Executing Grace, James R. Rogers carefully examines Christian arguments against the death penalty and sets forth a Biblical argument for its judicious use. From a redemptive-historical framework, he shows that death is an appropriate sanction for the attempt to extinguish God's image by killing an image-bearer.

These aren't short essays, but they're well worth your time if you'd like to think more carefully about these issues.