Items on religions, ideologies, philosophies, and other ways people interpret the world
Mon 24 Mar 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
Where Do They Go from Here?
The murder in early March of eight Jewish students at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem established some disturbing precedents. To begin with, it was the first major outbreak of violence in Jerusalem since 2004 and the first in Israel as a whole since a suicide-bomb blast in Tel Aviv in 2006. Second, it was committed by an Arab resident of East Jerusalem with no previously known ties to terrorist groups. That shook the nerves not only of Jewish residents of West Jerusalem, in which the murders took place, but of Arab East Jerusalemites worried about potential reprisals against them. Whatever their views on Israeli-Palestinian relations in general, East Jerusalemites have not usually been involved in major violence between Jews and Arabs. Third, an official daily newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, with which Israel is attempting to negotiate a peaceful settlement of issues leading to a Palestinian state, praised the murder without reservation. Al Hayat al Jadida placed a picture of the shooter, Alaa Abu D’heim, on its front page, proclaiming him to be a shahid—that is, as a fighter who had given his life in jihad, he had earned instant placement in the Muslim version of paradise, complete with access to seventy-two virgins.
Fri 07 Mar 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
If anyone doubted that America has become a national supermarket of different world religions, with people changing brands at a dizzying pace, they need doubt no more. A new survey by one of the country’s most prestigious research organizations, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, shows how rapidly and dramatically the religious scene in the U.S. is changing. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey was conducted during the spring and summer months in 2007, and involved interviews with no fewer than 35,000 Americans.
The basic outline of the landscape is not so new to those who have studied the American religious scene in the recent past. Though 78.4 percent of adult Americans (according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, in late February 2008 the total estimated U.S. population was 303.5 million people) describe themselves as Christian in some category or other, Protestants, the majority religion of Americans for most of our history, may soon be a minority. Today, they hold onto a narrow majority of 51.3 percent. Catholics comprise 23.9 percent and Evangelicals, a sub-category of Protestants, a robust 26.3 percent of American adults.
Thu 14 Feb 2008 • Responses: 2 • by Randy Isaac

Modeling Dialogue Rather than Warfare
Physicist Randy Isaac, executive director of the American Scientific Affiliation, argues that the prevailing public view of the relationship between science and faith as a conflict is sadly incomplete. He offers another model of dialogue and integration based on the experience of his colleagues.
Fri 01 Feb 2008 • Responses: 3 • by David W. Miller
Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite, by D. Michael Lindsay, Oxford University Press (2007).
Some books have the good fortune of being well timed and well written. Faith in the Halls of Power is one of those books. For those familiar with or maybe even a part of the American evangelical world, little in this book will surprise you, though its depth and breadth will impress you. For those who are not familiar with or a part of the American evangelical world, you might find the contents both jarring and comforting.
It is jarring, because Lindsay documents well the deep and successful engagement by evangelicals in the elite leadership ranks of virtually all strategically important spheres of modern society, including politics, the academy, the corporate world, and the arts. It is comforting, because most of the evangelicals Lindsay describes belie the negative stereotypical image of evangelicals held by many progressives, liberals, mainliners, and secularists. Lindsay’s evangelicals are not the narrow-minded, judgmental, backward, bellicose voices sometimes caricatured by today’s cultural elites. Rather, they are smart, savvy, and worldly, participating in and quietly trying to change the system from within, not withdrawing from the world or merely casting stones from the sidelines.
Thu 24 Jan 2008 by David Aikman
In case you didn’t know it, “Eyeless in Gaza” is the name of a British, post-punk New Wave musical duo who chose the name of their band from the novel by the same name by British writer Aldous Huxley. Huxley’s novel, which has nothing to do with the Middle East, was first published in 1936. Its title is borrowed from a line in Milton’s poem, Samson Agonistes, portraying the fate of the Biblical character Samson, who finally achieves revenge on the Philistines by pulling down the temple of Dagon with the last remains of his strength, and killing, in his dying act, more Philistines than he slew when he was a strong young man.
But less than two months after the much-publicized one-day conference in Annapolis, Maryland, hosted by President Bush to re-launch Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, “eyeless in Gaza” might well be an appropriate subhead—to use journalistic jargon—for anyone associated with negotiations over the future of Gaza and of Israeli-Palestinian relations as a whole.
Wed 16 Jan 2008 • Responses: 3 • by David Aikman
Independent, But Not Underground
“Sauna City” is a commercial building in the Asian Games district of Beijing that is only a few years old but already is beginning to look distinctly shabby. The main entrance to the building has a sign over it, “Night Club,” and there are advertisements for various kinds of bath-house activity; it doesn’t look like the most salubrious location in the Chinese capital. But as a visitor approaches the right-hand-side front entrance, his attention is captured by a most unexpected sound wafting down from somewhere above: Christian hymn singing.
Mon 03 Dec 2007 • Responses: 3 • by Roger Scruton

Irony, Sacrifice, and the Transmission of Culture
Roger Scruton, in a speech first presented to the Trustees of The Trinity Forum, draws engagingly from his autobiographical experiences to help us explore the purpose of education and the formative role of faith in fostering two virtues in Western culture that make it worth celebrating and preserving.
Fri 28 Sep 2007 by Jo Kadlecek
Fri 24 Aug 2007 • Responses: 2 • by Prabhu Guptara

Evaluating Three Alternative Approaches
Senior Fellow Prabhu Guptara offers a perspective on moving beyond global categories of left and right when it comes to the progress of human societies and individuals. He looks at three main alternatives from different faith traditions to the right-leaning elite and the left-leaning counterculture.
Thu 26 Jul 2007 • Responses: 66 • by Luder G. Whitlock, Jr.
A withdrawal of Western troops from Iraq will not assure that conflict will end.

The relationship between the West and Islam will be one of the most important issues during the first part of the twenty-first century. It has enormous implications not only for the Middle East, but for Europe with its growing Muslim population. The growth of a militant, violently ruthless Islam endangers not only the West, but the world.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
G. K. Chesterton
The Rise of Global Civil Society: Building Communities and Nations from the Bottom Up by Don Eberly.
A sweeping and hopeful overview of the extraordinary new forces that are prying open closed societies and cultivating democratic norms across the globe.
Orthodoxy: Georgetown’s Father Schall reviews G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy on its 100 year anniversary. “In coming to believe in Christianity, Chesterton, as he tells us, did not read a single Christian book in the process. Rather, he read book after book of those who maintained that Christianity could not possibly be true. After he had read many of these tractates, he suddenly realized that the intellectual opponents of Christianity were constantly contradicting themselves about what they were opposing. Chesterton, the most logical of men, figured that anything so odd as to be opposed for the exact opposite reasons must either be quite strange or, in fact, rather normal and true.” A helpful introduction to a lovely book. (James V. Schall, SJ, InsideCatholic.com , 2008 05 05)
Where Were Obama’s Friends?: Friendship under fire: “As for the supersized candidates, what strikes one most about them is their ‘aloneness.’ They look so solitary. Indeed, it is possible that the old and honorable notion of ‘standing with’ a candidate like Obama simply didn’t occur to his famous supporters this week. Everyone has become used to watching celebrity stars and athletes take it in the neck on their own. Even someone running for the nation’s presidency looks like just another personal crack-up.” Makes one pause. (Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal , 2008 05 01)
There’s no way you’re going to convince me: Catholic professor Scott Carson covers the current debates on evil between N T Wright and Bart Ehrman on Beliefnet: “[H]aving had a look at this most recent exchange I have to say that it continues to astound me how simplistic and thoughtless the popular treatment of the problem has become. . . . It’s as if generations of sophisticated and complex theological and philosophical argument amount to nothing when compared to the emotional attitudes of a single individual living in a highly particularized time and place. . . . Just as atheists and agnostics are often—perhaps way too often—tempted to assume that believers only believe for emotional or psychological reasons, so too, it seems rather obvious to me, every non-believer almost certainly has emotional and psychological reasons for not believing that will trump any and every legitimate argument posed against them.” (extensive links from the article to the primary sources) (An Examined Life , 2008 04 27)
The Way We Weren’t: “The fifties really were a time when the culture broadly affirmed Christianity as a Good Thing. I was there. I saw it; I heard it. And yet some kind of demurral is strongly indicated: some sign of recognition that no human society, whatever its good intentions and methods, has lived unburdened, unencumbered by the crushing weight of human fallenness. Good as life may appear to have been in the cities and universities of France and Italy in the thirteenth century, or amid the sweaty fervor of the camp meetings in nineteenth-century America, or among the fierce faith of the emancipators, always human pride and general nuttiness were there to spoil the broth.” (William Murchison, in Touchstone , 2008 04 23)
• Not on Sale (2008 04 14)
• Seven New Deadly Sins, Suitably Updated (2008 04 10)
• The Pope Comes to America (2008 04 09)
• Both Read the Same Bible (2008 04 09)
• Muslims Outnumber World’s Catholics (2008 03 31)