Totalitarianism II

Rowan Williams gets the point:

I think what’s at stake ultimately is whether the church is answerable finally to the State as the only court of appeal or whether the church can rightly appeal to other sources for its moral compass and whatever one’s views on this particular issue.

Totalitarianism

The Church as "the representative of liberty as such."

Nothing

The article by David Cameron, the British Conservative leader, is very symbolic of the time we are living. It means to be a philosophical statement, yet there is not one discernible idea (teaching English to everybody? That's it?). It is obsessed with identity, yet it shows a complete lack of it. In fact, it does not distinguish itself in any way from the opposite political side. When both sides have coalesced into complete cultural vacuum, what's left in democracy?

Hypocrisy

Rather than about spanking, our leaders should worry about Darfur.

Theory and moralism

The spanking controversy is another example of disappearing common sense (in the literal sense: a set of shared judgements based on real-life experience and passed on, often implicitly, from a generation to the next.)

Cold war

An interesting (if accurate) account of some KGB activities re.the Vatican.

An event

Hrant Drink's funeral has been quite remarkable.

Second Life

The Tablet has a story on the booming phenomenon of avatars (having an alternative self living in an imaginary digital universe). The problem, however, is not how Christianity can be a better "imaginative option." The question is whether Christianity can help us live reality so that don't feel the need to escape from it.

Clueless

A very typical result of contemporary Catholic education.

Oasis

John Allen on the presentation of Oasis yesterday in New York.

Book of the year

Sandro Magister has posted the preface to the Pope's important new book on Jesus Christ.

Not nothing

Charles Krauthammer on the latest stem cell developments.

Exodus II

Spiegel has a good piece on Christians in the middle east.

Exodus

A Saudi journalist realizes that there is a problem.

Nation vs. revolution

A helpful update on Iran.

Intolerance

An unusual column for the Guardian.

In flux

For those interested, the National Journal has a long and informative story on federal funding of the so-called faith-based initiatives (social works started by religiously-motivated groups).

Incurious people

It is true: the recent wave of atheists seem to be at the same time more ignorant and presumptuous than their predecessors. This partly due to the shallowness of what passes for "scientific" education.

Santa attack

Santa Claus boldly shows up in Kabylie. We hope nobody shoots him down.

Angry ghosts

The pervasive, moralistic anger in our public life is an obvious sign of a weak human fabric and of progressive detachment from reality, in which the person becomes

a ghostlike figure, perpetually in search of “something solid against which it can prove its own existence.” New Anger, Wood concludes, “is the desperately intense effort of these ghosts to feel real.”

For good examples of dogmatic, unquestioning, utterly moralistic and irrational anger, you can always rely on the editorial page of the Boston Globe. The possibility that people who disagree with them may have motives other than bigotry and ignorance never, ever arises. No fundamental questions (What are "rights?" Where do they come from? What is marriage?) are ever asked.