A mutation

You should know about the Apostolic Fathers.

Back to reality

The Economist on the Church in South America.

Destructive fantasy

Hell must be this kind of lack of reality.

God as Father

Protestant converts in Kurdistan.

Inhuman

Lots of theories keep being produced about the VT mass murderer. Some of the comments by Camille Paglia are somewhat interesting, inasmuch she understands that people's most vulnerable spot is their affectivity (which she confuses with sex).

Unredeemed I

Spengler reviews the lates posthumous book by Tolkien

Unredeemed II

A trip to Saudi Arabia.

"Where are the grown-ups?"

A good question by Peggy Noonan.

Screaming louder and louder

It is true that our culture is swamped with moralism. But the reason is not just an historical quirk, it is what the Pope in Regensburg called "reduction of reason." If morality is separated from knowledge and reason (the human quest for meaning), all that is left is arbitrary power...

Interesting

President Bush promises to support school choice.

Rapt in awe

More on Einstein's religiosity.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness.

Bottom feeders

There is a symbiotic relationship between madmen and journalists.

Help, friendship and support

Wave of adult baptisms in China.

Out of their depth

For some reason, this week both the NYTimes and the New Yorker have long pieces on Benedict XVI.

No conflict

Francis Collins on CNN.