Indispensable

This week Spengler gets excited about Catholic theology.

Missing the point

The Economist has a long series of articles on "religion" in the contemporary world. They are not terrible, but they lack a unifying criterion in order to judge what's going on. What is universal and explanatory are the religious questions (the "religious sense"), whereas there is not really much to be learnt in general by describing religious answers. But the fact that human beings ARE a need for meaning seems to escape this fine specimen of British empiricism.

The law of existence

Roger Scruton on altruism.

Unmoored

It is true that living only in the present leads to slavery.

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present.

A thirst for meaning

We keep enjoying Dalrymple's columns.

For the literature?

The people who 130 years ago would become anarchists today become jihadists

He said he decided to go to a predominantly Muslim country last fall to study Islam and learn about “the morals, the customs, the ethics and the literature.”

He should have read Dostoevskii instead.

Think and grow rich

Ryan Lizza is a brilliant writer with a knack for grasping what really motivates a politician. In this case, Romney is indeed a good example of the core appeal of Mormonism, which does not lie in its quite peculiar doctrines, but in the attraction of a wholesome and successful life

I want you to understand, the Lord does not care whether you become rich or not, but he does want you to learn how to succeed, and to be successful.

Perhaps. But the Lord's idea of success (also known as sanctity) is certainly greater than excelling as a business consultant, having a nice family and becoming president of the US of A.

Écrasez l'Infâme

Michael Gerson makes a decent point (modern liberalism places great faith in "science," but "science" per se can be twisted into very illiberal philosophical positions). It starts a bizarre flood of hatred (literally) in the comments section (Gerson was a speechwriter for Bush).

Nohing else?

Nothing more sad than having to choose between two extreme ideologies (islamism vs. Kemalist nationalism).

Neo-totalitarian

An example of ideology leading to violence.

Analysis

Fr. Samir on the letter by the 138 Muslims to the Pope.

Imaginative

There is something refreshing about Japanese openess to weird ideas.

Coming

Also Dick Morris predicts a Huckabee surge on the Republican side.

Forget global warming

A truly global phenomenon. You could call it "the final dissolution of traditional pre-industrial societies."

Arrogance

One characteristic of the dominant liberal post-marxist ideology is that it is unable to recognize that other ideologies matter. At most, those who have not yet joined our wonderful bourgeois life-style are just subjects for "cultural studies" departments.