Reformation truth revisited

I feel a need to bring attention to the good writing and thinking that I frequently come across, even if I don't have time--or feel the need--to offer much in the way of commentary. So that is what the next few posts are going to be and I hope to keep this up going forward. I will acknowledge in advance one of my main sources, Andrew Sullivan's The Dish at The Atlantic. In addition to his own writing, he and his assistants come across a lot of good stuff on topics I'm interested in.

Today and this week Lutherans, Protestants generally, and surely some Roman Catholics are remembering the beginning of the Reformation on October 31, 1517. With that in mind, here is a profound contemporary endorsement of Luther's doctrine that all of us are simil justus et pecator--at the same time justified and sinner.

The writer is a correspondent with Sullivan and quotes a work I am not familiar with. S/he endorses the Puritans (!) and correctly identifies contemporary fundamentalists of both right and left as missing this key Reformation insight. Their concern is much more for being right than about enabling transformation and redemption--to everyone's loss.

Efforts such as political correctness and movement conservatism are destructive of civil society and are based on nothing more than a chasing after the wind.