Items of note (7/16/10)

• Peter Slade’s new book, Open Friendship in a Closed Society, opens up some unsavory origin stories in the PCA and RTS. In response, Anthony Bradley sparks a discussion over what this history should mean for contemporary black and white Christians associated with those institutions. Did the doctrine of the “spirituality of the church” permit and perhaps even validate segregation? What are conservative Presbyterians doing now to heal the wounds?
• Is natural law “too cruel to bear”? James Matthew Wilson at FPR on the firing of religion professor Kenneth Howell.
• A new issue of American Theological Inquiry is out, with articles by Paul Helm, Gerald O’Collins, and Ben Myers.
• James Poulos tries to reconcile Hamiltonian and Madisonian conservatives.
• At Cardus, Jonathan Chaplin asks, “From Big State to Big Society”: Is British Conservatism becoming Christian Democratic?
• Kyle Strobel asks whether an evangelical theological tradition even exists.