A threat to the state

The thing about places like Algeria is that probably nobody cares about Islam as a religion. It is just the unifying ideology of society, whereas Christianity by appealing to personal freedom is an implicit threat to power. This reminds us of Solovev's remark that Islam was just the natural evolution of the Caesaro-Papism of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Big Switzerland

We suspect that Europe's irrelevance is cultural before it is political.

Disarmed

An essay by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese on marriage. She has two good insights:

a) That aberrations like gay marriage are in reality perfectly consistent with the dominant understanding of marriage, which is why they are almost unstoppable.

b) That the family is really an obstacle to power and that the goal here is "disaggregating all of the remaining social institutions that provide the foundations for any collective resistance against political and economic domination."

It's mathematical...

These researchers should read some American religious history. What they describe has a very long tradition, and reflects an inner contradiction of protestant theology, which is doomed by its separation of faith and reason to swing pendulum-like from Calvinism to naturalism and universalism. For instance, the Unitarian movement started in the early XIX century among New England Calvinist Puritans, and within a couple of generations became, guess what: a moralistic, therapeutic deism!

Moving to Beirut

An interesting analysis of what's going on in the Middle East.

Romance

Searching for love inSaudi Arabia.

Truly

Dalrymple on the Fritzl case.

I think that such cases bring into sharp focus our continual but continually failing attempts to understand ourselves and our place in nature. It is odd that we should have been equipped by that nature with a desire that (in my opinion) can never be fulfilled.

Well said

You may have missed this very balanced essay by Fr. Samir a few weeks ago.

Ready to explode

The US media do not care much about Lebanon.

An inconvenient truth?

In case you missed it, global-warming skeptics are having a field day with the latest data. This is challenging hundreds of careeers and millions of dollars in grants, of course, so the other side is desperate to twist back "science" in their direction.

Nihilism on campus

It is obvious that if all questions of meaning are removed, the humanities are bound to decay into ideology and politics.

40 years later

This year people are thinking back of 1968.

No reform without freeedom

The thing about education is that it requires educators. This implies that at some level somebody's freedom will be involved.

The oppression of sin

The tragedy Zimbabwe is significant because it reveals the lie of the "liberation" movements of the second half of the 20th century (which is still the dominant ideology in many US academic departments). The lie is that the world can be neatly divided in the oppressors (bad) and the oppressed (good). There is much more truth in the Catholic doctrine of original sin: that we all share in the same weakness, and that when the oppressed take power they will usually be just as evil and corrupt as the former oppressors.

Thought provoking Pope

Interesting comments on the Pope's visit by E.J. Dionne and especially by Michael Gerson (consider that the former is a quite "liberal" Catholic, and the latter an Evangelical).