Changing the destiny of mankind

Amir Taheri's discussion of Iranian foreign policy really sheds light on the mentality of Western "liberals", who cannot conceive that somebody could be driven by a totalizing ideal. Theirs, on the contrary, is the ideology of the bourgeois: a confortable life for all is the fulfillment of every conceivable human desire.

Networking

John Allen interviews Cardinal Scola

Daughter of a theory

Like all ideologies, feminism tends to embrace abstractions better than real people.

Uniform

It is not easy to be original.

A threat to the state

The thing about places like Algeria is that probably nobody cares about Islam as a religion. It is just the unifying ideology of society, whereas Christianity by appealing to personal freedom is an implicit threat to power. This reminds us of Solovev's remark that Islam was just the natural evolution of the Caesaro-Papism of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Big Switzerland

We suspect that Europe's irrelevance is cultural before it is political.

Disarmed

An essay by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese on marriage. She has two good insights:

a) That aberrations like gay marriage are in reality perfectly consistent with the dominant understanding of marriage, which is why they are almost unstoppable.

b) That the family is really an obstacle to power and that the goal here is "disaggregating all of the remaining social institutions that provide the foundations for any collective resistance against political and economic domination."

It's mathematical...

These researchers should read some American religious history. What they describe has a very long tradition, and reflects an inner contradiction of protestant theology, which is doomed by its separation of faith and reason to swing pendulum-like from Calvinism to naturalism and universalism. For instance, the Unitarian movement started in the early XIX century among New England Calvinist Puritans, and within a couple of generations became, guess what: a moralistic, therapeutic deism!

Moving to Beirut

An interesting analysis of what's going on in the Middle East.

Romance

Searching for love inSaudi Arabia.

Truly

Dalrymple on the Fritzl case.

I think that such cases bring into sharp focus our continual but continually failing attempts to understand ourselves and our place in nature. It is odd that we should have been equipped by that nature with a desire that (in my opinion) can never be fulfilled.

Well said

You may have missed this very balanced essay by Fr. Samir a few weeks ago.

Ready to explode

The US media do not care much about Lebanon.

An inconvenient truth?

In case you missed it, global-warming skeptics are having a field day with the latest data. This is challenging hundreds of careeers and millions of dollars in grants, of course, so the other side is desperate to twist back "science" in their direction.

Nihilism on campus

It is obvious that if all questions of meaning are removed, the humanities are bound to decay into ideology and politics.

40 years later

This year people are thinking back of 1968.