Assistant Village Idiot

Well, Arachne646 and agnosticnomore sure proved pooch correct right off the bat, didn't they? Why ask questions if you already think you know the answers? I suppose if you can swallow Shank's rewriting of history to serve his rhetorical needs you can swallow anything, though. Instead of arguing against what you can pretend people said then and say now, why not argue against real ones? I don't know if any of our wars were worth it, including the American Revolution, but you have to start all discussion by being merely honest. Here's a start: Search "haditha" on this site and see what you find in the way of accusations and assumptions, versus what you find in retractions. Then tell me you're on the side of truth.

Ayn Rand is of only minor importance in Tea Party thinking. Randians wish otherwise.

"...it makes God sad when big oil and gas companies eat out the heart of the earth for money."  Okay, you were being cute, but coming off the previous unevidenced assertions, you might not want to give away the game that the tie betyween your faith and your environmentalism may be founded on an anthropomorphising kitties-and-puppies argument.

Tradeoffs are the reality of the adult world.  Every time you find yourself thinking that something is an unmitigated evil, waving your hands about in the air claiming it is a climate disaster, you need to stop dead in your tracks and realise you must be at least partly mistaken.  Real life isn't like that.

If you do that often enough, you will discover that Bill McKibben no longer makes any sense, too, freeing up all the time you used to spend reading him.

Nice series. Christians might wish that Dickens were a bit more explicit in his Christianity in the story, but I think that would be expecting him to give what he did not have. He does include a few specific references, and he certainly absorbed the idea of personal charity, however vague and Unitarian he became in his beliefs.

There is an irony of the importance of Ebenezer's conversion, given that Dickens found those Christian groups that stress conversion - which at that time meant Methodists and later the Salvation Army - irritating. Perhaps he understood better at an intuitive level what was needed than he could apprehend intellectually. I think you pick up quite well the centrality of the the repentance and conversion themes, which have indeed been watered down to a more general "learning his lesson," or "seeing more clearly" in modern popular culture. The change in ES is deeper than that, and conversion is the proper word.

But I suppose if Chesterton could sign on so heartily, I shouldn't quibble, eh?

The first paragraphs in this essay. Are you quoting someone? Because it looks an awful lot like you are just mind-reading, attributing whatever motives and thoughts you like onto others. I suspect you will claim that people have said things like this and this is what they really mean, you are just fluffing it up for dramatic effect, etc, etc.

Unless you are wrong of course, even a little bit - in which case you are bearing false witness, which last I checked, was one of the Big Ten. You tread on very dangerous ground, but don't seem to treat that very seriously. That most people who write about political matters are similarly unworried about bearing false witness doesn't strike me as a strong excuse.

I could make up what Brian McLaren thinks and criticise him for that, you know.