Regensburg, part II

Read the Pope's magnificent address to the French intellectuals.

Different

Amir Taheri has read the foreign-policy platforms of the two parties. The summary is that McCain may be simplistic but Obama is naive (or ideological?)

Fluent but impatient

While talking about foreign policy, Fouad Ajami grasps something of how Obama is very representative of a certain contemporary type. It would be interesting to trace it back to the notion of education that is prevalent in our "top" universities. Essentially, people are taught only "science" (empirically-oriented knowledge directed at problem solving), but no "philosophy" (grappling in a systematic fashion with questions of truth and meaning)

Pow! Wham!

Camille Paglia is often fun to read.

Basic instinct

A conversion.

Inequality

A column by David Frum. It is interesting that, in order to push the Republican party out of its ideological empasse, he quotes as a moral authority John Paul II (Frum himself is Jewish).

The greatest disorder

What one sees in many stories about persecution is that Christianity is hated because simply by affirming the value of the person it is the greatest threat to the powers that be.

The elite again

Hanna Rosin comments on some statistics that show that

An intact happy marriage that produces well-behaved children, it turns out, is becoming a luxury of the elites.

The conclusion seems to be that (at some level) being affluent helps people getting their act together (apparently "well-behaved" means "using contraception"). A functional family as a bourgeois privilege: one more item in a catalog of possessions. Richer people can afford it, the poor cannot.

Terrified

Ross Douthat and Yuval Levin are scandalized by the media's hysterical reaction to the Palin nomination. But the reason is very simple: nothing scares the liberal elite like the idea that after losing the working classes culturally, they may also lose them electorally. In this sense, Palin is truly the anti-Obama, in a way McCain could never be -- because she explodes the contradiction that the interest of the common people should be best defended by an intellectual class that deep down despises those same people's values and ideals. For this reason Peggy Noonan is right when she says that

"they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick."

He loves Hemingway

An essay on the life of Sen. McCain. He clearly comes through as a true representative of the U.S. "stoic" tradition. Like all forms of romanticism (i.e. an esthetic substitute for Christianity) it's ambiguous: it can be a step on the way out or it can bring one back. But at least is something...

Boring

The New Yorker has an essay on religion and the elections. It is fair to say that there is nothing new (which unfortunately means that the discussion remains quite shallow).

German villages?

More evidence of historical affinities between European and Arab anti-semites.

In the City Journal, read also the latest Dalrymple.

Religious cleansing

Anti-Christian persecution in India.

Unmoored

The interesting point about Sen. Obama's infamous vote in Illinois is not that IT was morally revoltING but that HE was not morally revoltED. We are in a time in which, deep down, everything is politically negotiable, Why? Because morality is not rooted in any form of knowledge, i.e. in reason. There is hope of redemption even for the most hardened criminal if he KNOWS his wretchedness. But today, one can be a very nice person (like Obama seems to be) and a perfect nihilist without even knowing it.

Contretemps

The thing about France is that it was the first country to develop a modern, post-Christian ideology: the myth of the "Grande Nation." As is well-known, ideology enables people to stomach much bigger bloodbaths.