I don’t usually write about partisan politics (I find the whole thing rather depressing), but reading the news coverage today about Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards dropping out of the presidential race, I had the following thought. Suppose that the Republicans ultimately nominate John McCain and the Democrats nominate Hilary Clinton. Who should be McCain’s vice-presidential running mate? I have a suggestion, assuming that winning the election is the sole criterion in making the choice: McCain should choose Barack Obama.

This is a recording of a Norton Lecture delivered by Dr. Alvin Plantinga on October 25 of last year. Here he lays out why there is deep discord between science and naturalism, or atheism. The argument goes (in super-simplified form) that, while Christians believe that one of the signal characteristics of being a creature made in the image of God is the ability to know, to discern the really real, those who deny a Creator can only assume that evolution has outfitted humans with this capacity. Evolution may just as well have inculcated a propensity for self-deception as a survival mechanism. (Plantinga’s quotation from Darwin, in which the father of evolutionary science expresses a “horrid doubt” about whether the “convictions of men’s minds, which have been developed from the lower animals,” are in the end “trustworthy,” says it all.)

I see Plantinga’s argument emerging time and again in Christian apologetics today, especially contra the New Atheism. (See Timothy Keller’s upcoming The Reason for God—about which more in the next couple of weeks.)

By way of ChristianThinker.net.

So a Book TV–type chat show for the Web is scheduled to debut, called Titlepage.

When I first saw the headline and who the host was going to be, I thought maybe the site was going to serve as an auction block for new books—publishers read the first chapter on their laptops and ask to see more, offline. (Or, if enough interest in generated, maybe the author could force a bid then and there, à la eBay.)

Which might not be that bad an idea for new authors who lack representation—though I can’t help but think there must be something like that already out there, no?

As Rudy Giuliani goes gentle into that good night, it’s worth remembering what he was taken to represent, once upon a time. Or, at least, what Frank Rich told us he represented in the October 28, 2007, issue of the New York Times.

At that moment, Giuliani was on the top of all the polls, and “the most obvious explanation,” Rich explained,

is the one that Washington resists because it contradicts the city’s long-running story line. Namely, that the political clout ritualistically ascribed to Mr. Perkins, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values and their ilk is a sham.

These self-promoting values hacks don’t speak for the American mainstream. They don’t speak for the Republican Party. They no longer speak for many evangelical ministers and their flocks. The emperors of morality have in fact had no clothes for some time. Should Rudy Giuliani end up doing a victory dance at the Republican convention, it will be on their graves.

Giuliani meant, in other words, that the social conservatives were a spent force—in fact, that all concern with values was dead. National security and the war in Iraq have forever trumped abortion, and on those issues, Giuliani was the victor (despite “the mad neocon bombers” shaping Giuliani’s “apocalyptic” foreign policy, Rich felt compelled to add, just to be sure no one thought him capable of actually praising a Republican).

Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way. Perhaps the social conservatives never really had the ability to impose their candidate on the national party. Certainly they don’t have it this election cycle, as the campaigns of Brownback and even Huckabee show.

But the fiscal conservatives and the strong foreign-policy advocates don’t have that power either, and without at least a good percentage of social conservatives to form the third leg of the Reagan coalition, no candidate has much chance of winning the Republican nomination. And rightly so, for without a great deal of willingness from social conservatives to come out and vote in the national election, the Republican nominee has no chance of winning in November against the Democrats.

As it happens, lots of conservatives don’t like McCain, for a variety of reasons, some reasonable and some unreasonable. But at least, unlike Giuliani, the man genuinely does oppose abortion, and in the end, that has made a difference.

There is a measure of actual weakness in the national pro-life organizations here, if Frank Rich is still looking for one. Ever since 2002, most of those organizations have insisted that support for campaign-finance restrictions—particularly of the McCain-Feingold sort—is a black mark on a politician’s pro-life record (on the grounds that pro-life advertising would be unfairly limited during campaign seasons). But they have been mostly unable to persuade ordinary pro-lifers to go along.

McCain’s second blot, for the pro-life organizations, is his role in the Gang of 14’s settlement on judges. This is a more serious complaint: The battle over abortion is fundamentally a battle over the judiciary, at this point. George Bush found this out to his cost when he nominated Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, and McCain must make clear to voters that he wasn’t compromising the pro-life position when he joined the Gang of 14. Still, this wasn’t a failure to support the good candidates for the Supreme Court, which is of primary importance, and McCain has room to maneuver and explain.

Add it all up, and McCain looks like a candidate whom social conservatives could support in reasonably good conscience. He’s not their favorite—but he ain’t Rudy Giuliani, either. The three-part coalition of the Republican party remains alive, and in John McCain it seems to have found the candidate that everyone can live with. That’s not enthusiasm, of course, but it’s a long way from the New York Times‘ vision of Rudy Giuliani doing a victory dance on the grave of social conservatism.

(Hat tip: WDTPRS)

Every three years, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, one of the nation’s largest evangelical student groups and part of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES), hosts a missions conference called Urbana. The name came from the long-time host campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain, though the conference has outgrown its old home and two years ago was held at in St. Louis, MO. Twenty-two thousand students attended, myself included, and since the conference we receive an e-mail newsletter with the InterVarsity’s usual topics: missions, multiculturalism, living the faith on campus, etc.

This time around the newsletter bore the subject heading “Flirting with Catholicism.” There have been plenty of examples of evangelicals rediscovering the riches of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and incorporating them into their practices and beliefs, but I was nonetheless surprised to see four articles on Catholicism sent out from InterVarsity.

There was a summary of Flirting with Monasticism, the story of a Presbyterian pastor’s exploration of Dominican spirituality (a book I had seen for sale at the Urbana conference).

The weekly Q&A column offered a frank and fair assessment of the relations between IFES and the Catholic Church, particularly in Latin American countries.

An InterVarsity staff-worker who was born Catholic offers his reasons for remaining attached to some aspects of the Catholic faith, but not re-entering into full communion with the Church (closed communion, papal infallibility, and “tolerance for nominalism”).

And a former evangelical tells the story of her conversion to the Catholic faith through the writings of Dorothy Day and Flannery O’Connor.

While the latter two articles are by no means apologetic masterpieces, they are genuine, and the fact that they appeared in the newsletter of an evangelical missions conference is another small, but significant sign of an increased evangelical engagement with Catholicism.

The Vatican has posted the Pope’s Message for Lent. This year he stresses the spiritual discipline of almsgiving along with the principle of the universal destination of earthly goods. There’s this:

Almsgiving, according to the Gospel, is not mere philanthropy: rather it is a concrete expression of charity, a theological virtue that demands interior conversion to love of God and neighbor, in imitation of Jesus Christ, who, dying on the cross, gave His entire self for us. How could we not thank God for the many people who silently, far from the gaze of the media world, fulfill, with this spirit, generous actions in support of one’s neighbor in difficulty? There is little use in giving one’s personal goods to others if it leads to a heart puffed up in vainglory: for this reason, the one, who knows that God “sees in secret” and in secret will reward, does not seek human recognition for works of mercy.

And this:

According to the teaching of the Gospel, we are not owners but rather administrators of the goods we possess: these, then, are not to be considered as our exclusive possession, but means through which the Lord calls each one of us to act as a steward of His providence for our neighbor. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us, material goods bear a social value, according to the principle of their universal destination (cf. n. 2404)

In the Gospel, Jesus explicitly admonishes the one who possesses and uses earthly riches only for self. In the face of the multitudes, who, lacking everything, suffer hunger, the words of Saint John acquire the tone of a ringing rebuke: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?” (1 Jn 3,17). In those countries whose population is majority Christian, the call to share is even more urgent, since their responsibility toward the many who suffer poverty and abandonment is even greater. To come to their aid is a duty of justice even prior to being an act of charity.

He ends with this:

Dear brothers and sisters, Lent invites us to “train ourselves” spiritually, also through the practice of almsgiving, in order to grow in charity and recognize in the poor Christ Himself. In the Acts of the Apostles, we read that the Apostle Peter said to the cripple who was begging alms at the Temple gate: “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, walk” (Acts 3,6). In giving alms, we offer something material, a sign of the greater gift that we can impart to others through the announcement and witness of Christ, in whose name is found true life. Let this time, then, be marked by a personal and community effort of attachment to Christ in order that we may be witnesses of His love. May Mary, Mother and faithful Servant of the Lord, help believers to enter the “spiritual battle” of Lent, armed with prayer, fasting and the practice of almsgiving, so as to arrive at the celebration of the Easter Feasts, renewed in spirit. With these wishes, I willingly impart to all my Apostolic Blessing.

The entire message is rather short and well worth reading.