The Daily Web Roundup is a collection of links to the news, commentary, and information I found interesting or useful today. If you want to read more of what is found in this post, find links to my favorite news, commentary, and information sites at Dennis L Hitzeman’s News Reading List.

Deuteronomy 30:11-20 is an exhortation to do the Lord’s will that is just as relevant to us today as it was to the Israelites preparing to cross into the Promised Land. How so? Because it calls on us to dedicate ourselves to the Lord’s will, a will that is not somehow distant or yet to be revealed, but a Will that is among us, in our hearts and minds, through the power of the Word and the Sacraments.

I have been party to several conversations over the past several months on the topic of fundamentalist Islam that took the same basic direction. In those conversations, generally liberally minded people took the position that the threat of fundamentalist Islam, especially where it concerns the goal of establishing a new Islamic caliphate, is overblown or even completely non-existent. Many educated and aware people cannot conceive of the notion that such a threat can exist in these modern times, or they do not consider the establishment of such a caliphate and all that it would stand for as a threat.