thoughts in and out of season
Robert Reich was a class ahead of me at college, and at the time he stood out for his knack at picking out positions that were (1) somewhat ahead of the curve, so he could get a leg up as representative of The Next Big Thing, but (2) not too far ahead, so those in … More ...
How religious issues present themselves to the mainstream press in conservative red-state America: according to the Salt Lake Tribune,
The claim that the history of Europe from 1517 to 1648 shows that mixing politics and religion leads to endless violence, so that peace requires the secular state, always seemed odd to me. After all, states kill by nature, and they can be defended only if someone is willing to put his life on the … More ...
Keeping abreast of the times:
A review of Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police in The New Pantagruel brings out the nature of “celebrating diversity” in school textbooks: since almost anything one might assert, suggest or mention would be more favorable to one group or culture than another, the only things that can be asserted, suggested or mentioned are things like … More ...
A comment by Cardinal Hoyos in a recent interview has led to renewed speculation that the Vatican may do something decisive to make the Traditional Latin Mass more freely available. According to His Eminence:
… More ...“After more than fifteen years of the [papal indult requesting that the TLM be made “widely and generously” available]—and also taking
Good question: if “true Islam” is a religion for pussycats, where are the moderate fatwas? A fatwa, after all, is simply a legal ruling issued on request by a qualified scholar of Islamic law. If there were reputable scholars who could use ordinary Islamic methods to show that Islam is as benign as … More ...
There’s an article by a couple of social scientists in the May First Things on the aggressive secularist dominance of the Democratic Party that’s worth reading. It doesn’t say anything new or surprising (we’ve discussed this before) but when obvious issues are routinely ignored or denied a statement of the obvious helps us … More ...
So why are the Americans more religious than the Europeans? There have been a variety of explanations:
The exchange keeps rolling (previous parts here, here, here and here). Here’s an edited version of the most recent installment:
… More ...Liberal Lawyer: On what basis do you claim that representational democracy with divided powers and charters guaranteeing individual rights were inventions of Catholicism?
Jim Kalb: I said “representative government with distributed powers