Dis-educator

A new book on John Dewey, the man who probably shaped more than anybody else education in the US. The reviewer seems to miss the fact that what Dewey eliminated is not "moral" education. Our schools are full of mindless moralism. What is missing is the possibility for young people to develop critical thinking by being inserted in (and verifying for themselves) a living tradition. The tragedy of liberal education is that when you stop proposing a way to judge, you stop educating.

Misunderstanding freedom

"The point is that parenthood is against the grain of all the aspirations of our culture...pregnancy heralds at least one relationship of dependence...but you've spent much of the previous 10 years attempting to eradicate any hint of dependence, either of your own or of others on you."

Wrestling with demons

A true specimen of American Protestant Christianity. The cave story will sound familiar to all Walker Percy's readers.

Thought for the day

As a general rule people are happier when they are able to give their life for a greater meaning. They are miserable when the measure of their lives is determined by their own ideology (which is usually not really their own).

Discovering humanity

The historical events described in Joyeux Noël could only have happened in a civilization marked by Christianity. One wonders it anything like that could happen in today's Europe.

Freedom

The African-American children in Minneapolis are migrating to the charter schools.

The benefits of patriarchy

You are changing the history of the world by having children.

A historical turning point?

A column on the explosive growth of Christianity in Asia.

The utopian dream of the Catholic town

Would you live in Ave Maria, the first town in America to be run according to strict Catholic principles? Tom Monaghan, the founder of the Domino's Pizza chain, is creating the town 90 miles northwest of Miami.

Crisis of faith

Spengler remarks:

It is a striking difference between Islam on one hand, and Judaism and Christianity on the other, that Islam offers the promise of success as the reward for submission to God, while the older religions offer no greater consolation than God's own presence. It is God's presence itself before Job that provides the answer to Job's question... By the same token, Muslim unhappiness is not "about" the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or even the intrusion of Western secular values. It is about the Muslim perception that Islam's promise of success against its enemies has eluded them. It is a crisis of faith.

The fullness of Islam

New attacks against Egyptian Copts. The Vatican is losing its patience. On the relationship between Christianity and Islam, a 2005 column by Fr. Samir Khalil Samir.

It is as if priests and bishops did not understand that Christianity is the fullness of every religion's path. But it is only respect for a person and love for his struggle to live his faith in the modern world that urges me to announce the Gospel to him.

Totalitarian legalism

Intelligent atheist Theodore Dalrymple observes:

the correspondent’s premise that the legality of an act was the sole criterion by which one could or should judge it chilled me. It is a sinister premise. It makes the legislature the complete arbiter of manners and morals, and thus accords to the state quasi-totalitarian powers without the state’s ever having claimed them. The state alone decides what we have or lack permission to do: we have to make no moral decisions for ourselves, for what we have legal permission to do is also, by definition, morally acceptable.

Swedish bin Ladens

It is always impressive to what crazy extremes bad ideas can develop by the sheer force of logic separated from elementary experience.

Baby market

The striking thing about this interview is how the "expert" consciously avoids any attempt at assessing "good and bad," which would detract from her "scientific" expertise. Thus dies rationality, in the name of "science."

A test for new justices

The stage is ready at the Supreme Court for "its most significant ruling on abortion rights in almost 15 years."