thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Here’s a useful summary of one basic issue involved in current religious disputes over sex and whatnot: The Ecstatic Heresy. Basically, the question is whether God is personal and can do concrete things, or an indescribable ultimate principle that can’t tell us anything definite. The former view is better for ordinary believers, because it … More ...
“Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” once won a New Republic contest for the most boring conceivable headline for a New York Times editorial. With that in mind, here are some Canadian initiatives the Times would no doubt find worthwhile:
More items on AIDS, the all-purpose, all-political, all-symbolizing disease:
Here’s a brief interview with historian Thomas Madden, who makes some obvious points on what the Crusades were really like: Part 1 and Part 2. If a belated counterattack 900 years ago against Islamic military expansion and oppression is on the short list of the sins of Catholic Christendom, then Catholic Christendom looks pretty … More ...
We’ve seen a largely successful attempt at public abolition of Christmas. This may be a first sighting of a similar campaign for Thankgiving: from “Clifford’s Puppy Days,” a PBS children’s program, their latest episode Fall Feast:
… More ...“It’s the Fall Feast holiday, and the Howards are planning to visit Emily Elizabeth’s grandparents. But a snowstorm
Jacques Chirac took time off last week from promoting the EU and UN to worry about the threat posed by US cultural hegemony to the ecology of cultural particularism. A single world culture that chokes out the diversity of local cultures would be a “sub-culture,” he said, and would constitute a catastrophe for humanity.… More ...
The repeated assertion by the current Nobel peace laureate that HIV was deliberately created in a Western biological warfare laboratory has deservedly attained notoriety. The brief wire service story reporting the comments is a reminder of the world of international dreams—or fantasies—from which such prizes and comments emerge:
An example of what happens if the struggle against radical Islam is recast as a struggle against “fundamentalism” (that is, against every serious form of religion): French “headscarf” law bans priests from schools. Priests wear Roman collars, after all, and Roman collars are just like headscarves. The problem’s a general one. If you combine … More ...
Here are some of the fruits of the movement for full inclusiveness in religion, and more generally of the search for this-worldly transcendence: a mini-conference on homosexual sado-masochistic religion at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, a leading scholarly organization (search for the word “gay” on the linked page), and a respectful … More ...
One of the problems people have with religion today is that they don’t know what to make of the word “God.”
In a sense they’re right to be puzzled. Our concept of God is our concept of the most basic thing there is. It’s a concept of something beyond all concepts. That’s why Aquinas says … More ...