Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day!

Full text of the speech here.

UPDATE: Matt Kelley offers some excellent reflections on another of King's speeches, which is perhaps even more relevant than the above. Do click through and read it (HT James McGrath's reader).

12+ Best Links of 2008

Sherry at Semicolon had the great idea to compile the twelve best things she linked in 2008 (naturally, the fact that she included one of my posts has nothing to do with why I like the idea!). Anyway here are my twelve (plus) favorite links from 2008, in chronological order:

Be Grateful, It's Your Birthday, by Julie Grisolano, is easily the most thoughtful and moving article about the impact of abortion that I read last year. Please read it, then consider signing this.

Equally heartbreaking is Sex and Scandal at Duke from Rolling Stone. It's an older article (written in 2006), but still well worth a read.

On a lighter note, there's Hell Abolished, God Adopts Gold Sticker System at The Wittenburg Door, which also wins the prize for most comments I've ever seen on a post (5441!).

Kim Fabricius, who is always worth your time, is at his very best in this paradoxical sermon: Lose Your Faith.

On another note, with the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica premiering in less than two weeks (!!), this is still the best post I've seen on the mid-season finale: Battlestar Galactica Provides Earth-Shattering 'Revelations' (major spoiler warning).

Next is another from The Wittenburg Door, but this one is more substantial (but still funny): Joe Bob Parties With the Atheists.

Steven Greydanus posted an excellent article on good, evil and the supernatural in recent film, at Christianity Today: Hellboy, Evil and the Cross.

Two for one: Nick Milne posted the most comprehensive of the many responses to P.Z. Myers' desecration of the Eucharist, the Quran, and a copy of The God Delusion, while Francis Beckwith offered perhaps the most succinct summary of my own view of the debacle.

And back to the fluff, there's Five O'Clock People, whose latest CD is still awesome, and still maddeningly unavailable; listen to it here.

Back to the meat, and another double-dip, here's a thought-provoking article at The Other Journal on Why Every Christian Should 'Quite Rightly Pass for an Atheist', and the response: On What Could Quite Rightly Pass for a Fetish.

Halden at Inhabitatio Dei wrote an outstanding post on Moral Equivalence, War, and Abortion.

Alan Knox had an excellent and humorous series on Scripture... As We Live it.

And finally--a bonus--my favorite comic of 2008 (from xkcd):

Abortion and Moral Equivalence

From Inhabitatio Dei (a great blog I just discovered), Moral Equivalence, War, and Abortion:

I am utterly against the liberal platitudes that would seek to minimize the importance of abortion within our public discourse. But likewise I am utterly against the sort of ethic of innocence that is utilized to establish abortion as an utterly unique instance of horrific violence that trumps all others. What makes forms of violence morally serious cannot depend on the innocence or non-innocence of those who suffer them. What makes violence morally serious is not that it falls on people who are innocent, but that it falls on persons who are human.

As such I get uncomfortable at the way many conservatives seek to elevate the issue of abortion to a pedestal above all other issues of violence and coercion in our culture. To use the seriousness of abortion as a shield against having to think about the moral severity of militarization, torture, and genocide is just as reprehensible as those who use such issues to downplay the seriousness of abortion. John Paul II was correct to include all of these horrors within his indictment of the “culture of death.” Seeking to do some sort of moral algebra within the culture of death to determine which is the “worst” seems like an utterly wrong question.

Read the whole thing.