Provocations
A Journal from The Trinity Forum

Steep Trajectory

Wed 07 May 2008 by Al Sikes

Free Lunch Writ Large

We are deep in the blame game over the housing bubble, writes Al Sikes. Mortgage brokers, banks, rating agencies, property flippers, and regulators have all made the list. Perhaps somebody should go upstream in a search for the real culprit. 

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McClay at the White House

Tue 06 May 2008 • Responses: 0 • by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay recently spoke at a reception in the East Room of the White House honoring the 265th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson. You can read a transcript of his talk here, courtesy of the Ethics & Public Policy Center.

So let it be for his ideas that we honor Jefferson, above all else. And for the cause of human freedom and human dignity that he so eloquently championed. His failings may weigh against the man, but not against the cause for which he labored so heroically. That should be a lesson to us today. Like Jefferson, we all are carriers of purposes far larger than we know. Purposes whose full realization cannot be achieved in our lifetime, or even be fully understood by us, but which we are called to carry forward as faithfully as we can—as charges to keep.

Johnston on Speaking of Faith

Tue 06 May 2008 • Responses: 0 • by TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Douglas Johnston was featured on a recent edition of the public radio program, Speaking of Faith. The greatest threat in the post-Cold War world, he says, is the prospective marriage of religious extremism with weapons of mass destruction. Yet the U.S. spends most of its time, resources, and weapons fighting the symptoms of this threat, not the cause. The diplomacy of the future, he is showing, must engage religion as part of the strategic solution to global conflicts.

China, Tibet, and the Olympics

Mon 05 May 2008 • Responses: 0 • by David Aikman

Placing the Olympics above world politics is a valiant but vain hope.

When the French nobleman and historian Baron Philipe de Coubertin revived the idea of the Olympic Games in Paris in 1894, he was motivated by both nationalism and idealistic internationalism. He felt the French had lost their war with Prussia in 1870 because of their poor physical conditioning. But de Coubertin had also been inspired by an English physician, botanist, and magistrate, William Penny Brookes. Another eccentric idealist and philanthropist, Brookes had first organized an “Olympian Games” in 1850 in the English rural village of Much Wenlock, Shropshire. De Coubertin visited the Much Wenlock Olympics in 1890, and returned to France inspired. 

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A Tale of Temptation for Our Times

Mon 28 Apr 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Joseph Loconte

Thoughts on ‘The Screwtape Letters’

Senior Fellow Joseph Loconte looks at the themes behind C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters—both the original book and the current stage play, suggesting that the bond between faith and reason points to the deepest mystery of human existence. 

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A Brief Chat with Screwtape

Mon 28 Apr 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Max McLean

Playing the Devil in D. C.

Actor Max McLean describes what it is like to play Screwtape in the stage adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, playing at the Lansburgh Theatre in Washington D.C. through May 18, 2008.

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Christ for Culture

Sun 27 Apr 2008 • Responses: 0 • by T. M. Moore

Enduring Standards in a Confused Age

Surely there is a better way to do culture than the one which has produced American Idol? T. M. Moore makes a radical proposal that there is. He says we must learn to look beyond mere personal preference and our current sensual and materialist agenda to discover divine standards for beauty, goodness, and truth in the person of Jesus.

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Obama’s ‘Bitter’ Comments

Sun 27 Apr 2008 • Responses: 3 • by David Aikman

The rigors of the campaign lead to what may be a landmark moment.

Every presidential campaign cycle has its landmark moments. Television viewers watching the debate in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy were shocked by how unattractive Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow appeared. He lost the debate on television, even though those who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon had scored more points. Then there was the moment when Ronald Reagan seized the microphone during a 1980 Republican primary debate in New Hampshire and announced that he had “paid” for the microphone and was going to hold onto it. And who can forget Michael Dukakis, George Bush’s opponent in the 1988 election, trying, by driving a tank on camera, to look manly and in-charge and to demonstrate he was commander-in-chief material? Unfortunately, he simply looked absurd.

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Firm Foundations?

Sun 27 Apr 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Pete Peterson

Is there a difference between earthquake-proofing and terrorist-proofing our buildings?

The next steps in the eventual building of One World Trade Center were taken last month in a desolate patch of the New Mexico desert about ninety miles south of Albuquerque with little media fanfare, but a large bang. There, the building’s architects from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill witnessed the explosion of a three-story replica of the structure’s aluminum and glass casing. The test was a success as only few of the glass panels were smashed in the blast.

In a post–9/11 world, that’s how we must design and build the skyscrapers of the future: capable of withstanding acts of God and man. Here in California, earthquake-testing our tall buildings has been a mandated practice for decades, and in other regions of the country, formalized tests for withstanding high wind and rain are not only well-known, but are a required part of architectural education.

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Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright

Tue 01 Apr 2008 • Responses: 0 • by David Aikman

By many observers’ reckoning, Senator Barack Obama’s major speech on race in the U.S. at Philadelphia’s Constitution Center March 18 was one of the rhetorical highlights of the 2008 presidential election season. Obama’s 5,000-word address was skillfully crafted, eloquent, and a powerful attempt to bring balance—and the views of both blacks and whites—into discussion of “America’s original sin” of racial injustice over the centuries. As the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya (which raises the question why people of mixed race with one black parent and one white parent are almost always deemed to be black and not white), Obama is certainly in a good position to shed light on this often poorly illustrated topic.

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