The Secular Religion of Blair and Bush
The fact that my lenten discipline includes things with screens means that my blogging is going to be a little sparse till Resurrection Day (though thankfully there are also little resurrection days, aka Sundays in Lent...). The following op ed piece comes via Jamie Smith's blog, and represents a nice example of theologians of the Radical Orthodoxy tribe engaging the "public" sphere. The authors are Philip Blond and Adrian Pabst:

Secular Britain was shocked last weekend when Prime Minister Tony Blair said that God would be his judge over the war in Iraq. Similarly, President George W. Bush has often used God to justify the war on terror as a religiously blessed and righteous campaign against "evil doers." Predictably, those who oppose the war view themselves as secular progressives untainted by religious fundamentalism and the madness it produces.

Unfortunately for liberals, the origins of Bush's and Blair's religious convictions lie not within Christianity but rather within the history of Western modernization and, most important, within contemporary liberalism itself....

To read the rest, go here.

Here are a couple more things from Blond and Pabst. The first follows on the same theme as above. The second hearkens to Cavanaugh's work I noted a couple of weeks ago.

• "Why the West Gets Religion Wrong"

• "Europe Needs to Start Thinking Locally"