Not serious

Slavoj Zizek makes (implicitly) a good point. Why should we care about "culture" if we don't value what's cultivated (the human person as relationship to the infinite).

Still there

An interesting article on people in a vegetative state.

Corpses are not biodegradable?

Sometimes one wonders if some aspects of the environmental ideology express a quiet return to Paganism.

Education's end

A review of the Kronman book on "meaningless" education.

Interesting

Actually, Huckabee does sound like an "authentic" politician, in the sense of expressing a genuine strand of American popular (Evangelical) culture (even including the weight loss part). In an increasingly ideological age, one can certainly do worse.

Witnesses

We have to be thankful when somebody rediscovers what should be obvious.

Collapsing

What is most striking about horrific stories like this one is not how bad the criminals are, but how they are enabled by the absolute human and moral vacuum of the surrounding society (England).

The greatest disorder

Christianity in North Korea exemplifies the fact that the root of freedom lies in the relationship with God.

Naive

In spite of some interesting insights, the idea of moral psycology is somewhat comical. The bottom line is that you cannot understand anything about human beings if you leave out (or reduce) their two most obvious (an mysterious) features: reason and freedom. The last sentence is downright funny, because the guy is clearly being very bold:

“It is at least possible,” he said, “that conservatives and traditional societies have some moral or sociological insights that secular liberals do not understand.”

For that matter, it is also at least possible that secular liberals do not understand much about anything. After all, what they think they understand is just what is written in their genes.

The meaning of life

This essay raises a valid question (why our educational system systematically censors the great questions about life?) but offers inadequate answers (the great books? the university as an alternative to religion?). The problem is NOT one of religious indoctrination, but one of method. How can one face these questions reasonably? The absence of "meaning" from education is just a reflection of the reduction of reason that the Pope denounced in his Regensburg address. Reason coincides with the methods of empirical science, and empirical science knows no meaning, so what's there to teach? In particular, the humanities must by logical necessity become the domain of pure relativism and unbridled instinctivity.

Failure of desire

A genuinely American ideology. In this case, the starting prejudice is an inadequate definition of "success." What if one achieves all his goals and then is still unhappy?

Public stupidity

Der Spiegel should ask the question: where are today's people taught how to judge? By whom?

A story of two newspapers

There is a striking difference between a newspaper offering balanced political judgements and a bunch of politicians using a newspaper. Of course, the first course is smarter because it gives you authority (which the Post has been steadily gaining) while the second course is self-destructive (who cares to read the New York Times editorial page any more?)

Unexplicable hatred

T. Dalrymple proves once again to be an unusually intellectually honest writer.

Read Dostoevski

Slate has noticed the obvious: that Islamism is a self-standing totalitarian ideology (in the mold of the European ideologies that started after the time of the French revolution) and not something related to specific political issues in the Middle East.

Radical Islamism seems to have become the magnet for some of the world's angriest people who feel the universe is out of joint and must be changed. For these converts, it is an ideology of revolt that is more attractive because of its crystalline hatred of the status quo than its theology.