thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb 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 ...
A first-rate summary of why making individual autonomy the ultimate political standard doesn’t work: The Tyranny of Liberalism And Its Evil Root: Individual Autonomy as the End of the State. Sample quote:
… More ...“[N]o polity could be grounded in an ideology, which is nothing more than an aspect of a cultural inheritance about which one
I just finished reading The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit, by A. J. Conyers. It’s a book-length treatment of a constant theme here at Turnabout, that “tolerance” as a principle—the demand that standards other than money, power and the like be treated as purely personal commitments … More ...
Not a book everyone would find useful or interesting, but I’m getting something out of it: Ride the Tiger, by Julius Evola.
The author calls the book “a survival manual for the aristocrats of the soul,” although in concrete fact I’m not sure there is such a thing in his sense. Still, it’s … More ...