Global Culture
Items on Global development, immigration, environmentalism, wealth and poverty, and so on
Obama’s Challenges Overseas
Tue 23 Dec 2008 by David Aikman
It’s likely that historians will view the 2008 election as a moment when America turned inward and looked hard at what was going on inside the country. Many recently-elected presidents have taken office with a decidedly strong pre-occupation with foreign affairs: Richard Nixon was one, and George H. W. Bush another. Both men, incidentally, accomplished major things in foreign affairs but were tripped up by American domestic developments.
Democracy and the Intelligentsia
Wed 26 Nov 2008 by Micah Mattix
Charles Kurzman, Democracy Denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy, Harvard University Press, November 2008. 405 pages, $49.95
When I was a teaching assistant at one of Switzerland’s cantonal universities, one of my colleagues once told his students that they, as the intellectual elite of the country, were responsible for protecting Switzerland’s liberal democracy against dangerous attacks on individual freedom from the extreme right. The face of that extreme right was Christoph Blocher, who became a member of the Swiss Federal Council in 2004, and who took a number of public positions that encouraged xenophobia and racism. As my colleague spoke, however, he seemed to lump religious conservatives with Blocher as potential enemies of liberal democracies worldwide. The reasoning, it seems, was that religious conservatives too worked to limit individual freedom, in particular with respect to moral issues such as gay rights and abortion.
Johnston Profile in Christianity Today
Wed 26 Nov 2008 by TTF Staff
Senior Fellow Douglas Johnston was featured in “The Father of Faith-Based Diplomacy,” an article on Christianity Today in September.
Johnston, a globetrotting 69-year-old, founded the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD) eight years ago because he saw religious faith as a catalyst for peacemaking, instead of a basis for conflict. Johnston . . . has learned that Muslims will listen more closely to a Christian than to the typical secular Westerner. Johnston doesn't evangelize, but his center's Christian motivation and framework are clear. "If you can operate on a faith-based basis, you find that, particularly with Muslims, they really open up," says Johnston. "This is what they like to think they're about. They get very uncomfortable dealing with just secular constructs."
How Does Culture Change?
Thu 13 Nov 2008 • Responses: 8 • by John Seel
The Hunter Thesis
John Seel presents James Davison Hunter’s emerging thesis on cultural change. The right strategies start with a right understanding of how culture is made, and changes. It starts with recognizing the difference between Esperanto and E*TRADE.
The Global Culture of Debt
Fri 31 Oct 2008 by Prabhu Guptara
This essay is adapted from a presentation to the Bettag Konferenz of the EVP (Evangelical People’s Party of Switzerland), 20 September 2008. We are publishing it as background material for the Provocations short piece adapted from Professor Guptara’s lecture on “The Institutionalization of Greed”.
The Institutionalization of Greed
Wed 22 Oct 2008 • Responses: 4 • by Prabhu Guptara
Excerpts from a Trinity Forum Conversation
“As a culture shifts from being focused on tradition or society or God to being focused on money, then the kinds of problems we have had over the past few years are only to be expected.”
Christianity, Democracy, and the European Constitution
Tue 21 Oct 2008 by Paul Vanderbroeck
Le Christ philosophe, by Frédéric Lenoir. Paris: Plon, 2007, 306pp., € 19.
The publication of a book on the link between our modern values and Christianity is most welcome during a time and age, when in Europe we seem to have lost the ideological basis of our society. The French philosopher, scholar of the History of Religions, and Director of the prestigious Le Monde des Religions Frédéric Lenoir joins nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in putting forward the thesis that the churches have obscured the real message of the Gospels in their communication with their congregations. Lenoir believes that the modern appearance of separation of church and state, human rights, freedom of conscience—everything that has been done during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries against the will of the clerics—happened only by implicitly or explicitly resorting to the original message of the Gospels.1
A New Bretton Woods for the New Millennium?
Tue 21 Oct 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
The global financial crisis, now into its second month as a factor in everyone’s consciousness, has done more than change the dynamics of the current U.S. presidential election. In the U.S. it has shifted the balance, even if only slightly, to Senator Barack Obama. This is because Democratic politicians are generally associated with big government, and many Americans at a time of national financial anxiety instinctively feel that the best thing that can bail them out of trouble is government. But globally, there may be a far more important tectonic shift taking place. This is the sense that global economic leadership may now be transferring itself to the European Union, the 27-member economic confederation of European states.
A European Challenge to Anti-Americanism
Mon 01 Sep 2008 • Responses: 1 • by Joseph Loconte
For the better part of a decade, pollsters, pundits, and politicians have beaten the drums of anti-Americanism with a flamboyance that would rival Big Band legends Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa. Last week, however, America’s friends from across the Atlantic announced an initiative to pound back.
A group of British conservatives has launched America in the World, a London-based international alliance to combat anti-Americanism. Armed with briefings, polling data, policy analysis, and high-level political endorsements, America in the World seeks to become the most important fact-driven resource for people willing to entertain the case against anti-Americanism. The effort is the brainchild of Tim Montgomerie, founder and editor of the influential political website ConservativeHome, and Stephan Shakespeare, the founder of YouGov, a prestigious opinion-polling company in Britain.
The U.N.’s Human Rights Charade
Wed 13 Aug 2008 by Joseph Loconte
The Geneva-based U.N. Watch has just released its critique of the tenure of former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour. Entitled, “The Right to Name and Shame,” the report offers a clear-eyed look at the record of the U.N.’s most prestigious human-rights official. Sadly—but predictably—Ms. Arbour’s performance, painstakingly examined, receives mixed reviews:
