From scratch

This piece by Joseph Bottum is too long but does capture some important aspects of recent US church history.

Two worlds

Spiegel has a report from Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Keep the flame burning

A story in the NYTimes on the predicament of young evangelicals facing the onslaught of a nihilistic culture. It is hard when so much is predicated on individual will-power and enthusiasm. But, where is the Church?

Good luck

An update on the desperate attempts to rebuild college curricula in a context where there is no "university" because there is no unifying hypothesis.

No salvation from the UN

Few things magnify moral failures more than bureaucracies. More generally,certain idealistic people should learn from St. Augustine that usually states are just "larger scale robberies".

Dry humor

Some Brahms anecdotes.

Still there

The Zoroastrians are hanging in there. But how does The Guardian dare say that there were "forced mass conversions" after the Islamic invasions of Persia? Didn't they read their own editorials about the Pope's speech?

Stuffy

Not much going on with the masons.

Original sin to the rescue

It turns out the Iranians hired the Russians to build a nuclear reactor based on the Chernobyl design "on one of the most active earthquake zones on earth." Ah, and they also got scammed in the process.

That finally explains why Putin always seemed so unconcerned about the Iranian nuclear program.

We don't want to know

A first-hand report from Egypt.

A recipe for slavery

This reflects a problem across the board, not just with history. Quite simply, proposing the past is just not part of the way most US educational institutions understand themselves. Quite often the curriculum in the humanities is dominated by "pseudo-science" (psicology, anthropology, sociology, social studies, multiculturalism, diversity theory, feminism, all kinds of moralistic fluffiness etc.) Not much education results.

Cultural divide

USA Today reports on the fertility gap between Democrats and Republicans. There is also a link to an article on the "marriage gap."

Dire straits

The saga of string theory is a good example of the predicament of reason in our culture: lots of reasoning, very little observation. Even science cannot survive forever when everybody cares more about their own mental processes than the truth.

Reduced reason

Lee Harris points out (correctly) that the Pope's central concern has been to come to the rescue of reason.

Virtual life, real violence

All that is required to make people crazy is detachment from reality. But what can attract them back to it?