* Philosophers' Carnival #30 is up at "Anniemiz". I don't know if it's just that I have more leisure to read them through, or whatever else, but this one seems to me to have been a very good one. Worth special mention are: O come, o come Immanuel (on Kant) at "DuckRabbit"; Religion in the Modern World at "Lelia Thomas"; Choosing a Path that's Clear (on free will & feminism) at "Persephone's Box"; Vagueness and the Paralysis of Philosophy at "hell's handmaiden"; and Vengeance and Justice at "Stop that Crow!" I may say something about one or two of these at some point.
* Week Four of the Online Philosophy Conference has opened. I particularly recommend the discussions of retributivism (Brooks and David), Siegel's paper on seeing causation, and the discussion of ontological commitment (Turner & Manley).
* I had blogged about this quite some time ago, but forgotten it completely. GovTrack.us is a convenient way to keep track of bills being examined in the U.S. Congress, as well as of the discussions of those bills in the blogosphere.
* Trent Dougherty and Matthew Mullins have both started blogging about Augustine's Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love. Trent's first post is here, Matthew's is here.
* Jan Steutel and Ben Spiecker argue for Good Sex as the Aim of Sexual Education.
* "The Little Professor" has links for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday.
* A Canadian singer-songwriter I wish were more popular in the U.S.: Jann Arden. My four favorite Jann Arden songs: "Never Mind", "The Sound of", "Sleepless", and "Waiting in Canada".
* Canon and the Disputed Books of the New Testament (HT: 21st Century Reformation)
* Don't forget to check out Carnivalesque, if you haven't yet. In part because of the short notice (I signed up as host very late because no one else had volunteered, and I thought it was better to have a hurried edition than a hole in the series), it was in some ways harder than other carnivals I've hosted. I thought up several ideas I would have liked to try out, but couldn't, due to time constraints. (E.g., I wanted to do a Timaeus theme -- a good theme for unifying ancient and medieval periods, and it could have doubled as a tribute to Pelikan, who has an excellent book on the influence of the Timaeus on the medieval period; and I wanted to do more to organize the general collection of links; I wanted a Francophone section to get more cross-interaction, and because it's a feature I've always liked about Canadian conferences; etc.) Nonetheless, it turned out well. As Another Damned Medievalist notes, the carnival was in the end slightly tilted toward the ancient (which surprises me, because I read more medieval blogs more often than almost any ancient blogs; but perhaps has something to do with the nominations I received and the apparent fact that some ancient bloggers seem blog more than most medieval bloggers). And as Ralph Luker pointed out, it is missing Chaucer's The Cipher of Leonardo. Indeed, it is completely lacking anything that has to do with the Da Vinci Code. That would have been a good panel (particularly given that a carnival like this is in part supposed to be an interaction between academics and laypersons), if I had thought of it, and if there turned out to be enough posts to cover it. Still, as I said, it turned out well. I was somewhat hesitant about including some of the LiveJournal posts that were nominated; it's more difficult to judge how private a LiveJournal is supposed to be than it is to judge with the rest of the blogosphere -- LJers are a quirky species of blogger: they're hard to fit in one category of 'public' or 'private'. But I chose carefully, and hope that it doesn't cause any LJers discomfort to have been nominated for such a public forum.
