Gleanings Quick Links

Religious Tolerance and the Common Good: Must read. “God made you for a purpose. The world needs the gifts he gave you. Adulthood brings power. Power brings responsibility. And the meaning of your life will hinge on a simple, basic choice. Will you engage the world with your heart and brains and faith, and work to make it a better place—not just for yourself and the people you love but also for people you don’t even know whose survival depends on your service to the common good? Or will you wrap yourself in a blanket of noise and toys and consumer junk, and stay a child?” I hadn’t realized he is on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom with Mike Cromartie.  (Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, On The Square )

Fri 25 May 2007 from Peter Edman • Link & Comments

Is Christianity Good for the World?: A four-part debate between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson (not ours, the other one with the perfectly titled “Blog and Mablog” weblog). Provocative, to say the least. From Wilson’s opener: “I had been minding my own business on this subject for a number of years when I saw Sam Harris’s book on the desk of a colleague, and that led to my book in response, not to mention a review of Richard Dawkins’s most recent book, and now a series of responses to your God Is Not Great, all culminating in this exchange. I am afraid that my problem is this: The more I stir the bowl, the more certain fumes, mystery meats, and questions keep floating to the surface.” (Christianity Today )

Thu 24 May 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Hitchens gives atheism a bad name: This is a great demonstration of the strengths of weblogs. This blogger has fun assessing the several Hitchens debates around the country, including the online one from CT. “I kept wishing that Hitchens had the wherewithal to meet a formidable Catholic opponent like Richard John Neuhaus, Benedict Groeschel, Peter Kreeft, Stanley L. Jaki, George Rutler, George Wiegel, or John Corapi. Five of the seven aforementioned men are priests, but that’s incidental to the fact that any one of them could make Hitch work for his points. Ditto the “B-team” of Karl Keating, Christopher Buckley, Thomas Howard, Edward T. Oakes, Amy Welborn, J.A. Gray, and Benjamin Wiker. Sadly, Hitchens is not likely to debate any of those people. Most of them have better things to do, and so we have to settle for the fight cards we actually have.” I’d personally love to see a Hitchens-Jaki debate, or even one with Rodney Stark.  (Patrick O’Hannigan, The Paragraph Farmer )

Thu 24 May 2007 from Peter Edman • Link & Comments

Scruton-izing the Reasons for Religion: Several good links on the recent atheism resurgence, most focusing on our own Senior Fellow, Roger Scruton, from whom this quote: “Whatever the disasters that love may cause, . . . love, judged in itself and without regard to contingencies, is a human good — perhaps the greatest of human goods. The important thing is to learn to love rightly and in the right frame of mind. The disasters, if they come, come as accidents and not by necessity. That is the response that should be made on behalf of religion, too.” (Carl Olson, Ignatius Insight )

Thu 24 May 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Christopher Hitchens Is a Treasure: A good, useful atheist. “Hitchens is in our time one of the great masters of mockery and satire. He out-pains Tom Paine, the same Thomas Paine, mocker of the Bible-toting, who endured imprisonment in France after 1789, forewarning the Jacobins that their atheism would cut the ground out from under their declared human rights. In moral heroism, standing up against angry mobs, Hitchens is often Paine’s equal, just as, like Paine, Hitchens seems quite annoyed by Him in Whom he does not believe.” (Michael Novak, National Review Online )

Thu 24 May 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

The Devil, You Say: “Secularized moderns are ill-equipped to deal with the problem of evil. They don’t get it when someone runs amok in Virginia or Baghdad, slaughtering people on whom he’s never previously laid eyes. This is the problem of evil. It is a theological problem. You won’t find it addressed in textbooks on psychology or sociology, least of all on the editorial pages of The New York Times or USA Today. The people who write these textbooks, these editorials, don’t grasp what is at stake. To do so, one has to be a supernaturalist — an underutilized job description in our cyberworld.” (William Murchison, Creators Syndicate )

Wed 16 May 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Interior Life Of Atheism: “The Christian is quite free to believe that every religion in the world has gotten something right (some more than others). You are even free to believe that adherents of other traditions have had real encounters with the supernatural (whether divine or demonic). However, if you are an atheist, you have to believe, a priori, that 99.999% of the human race is absolutely wrong about the thing that matters to it most. Christians have the luxury of being able to be humble before the facts.” The case of Emile Zola is worth reading, and the overall tone of this article is spot-on. (Mark Shea, National Catholic Register)

Fri 11 May 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Ceremonial Deism?: Good thoughts. “Ten or fifteen years ago it would have been unimaginable, but the natural unitive force of Christianity, ironically set free at last by the cultural solvent of radical secularism, has caused us to set the family quarrels aside for future resolution—I am not saying we should be indifferent about them or should whip up our denominations into an ecclesial souffle—and treat one another as the brothers and sisters we really are.” I commend the sentiment behind them to the shameful know-nothing branch of the Evangelical Theological Society.  (Anthony Esolen at Touchstone's Mere Comments blog)

Wed 09 May 2007 from Peter Edman • Link & Comments

Closing one door, opening another: On the retrenchment of Coral Ridge Ministries: “Politics is about compromise. The message of the church is about Truth. One has to look no further than the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons—who long ago gave up speaking of another kingdom and another King (if they ever did) in favor of faith in the Democratic Party—to see how quickly the church and its primary message can be blurred when it enters into a shotgun marriage with politics. . . . Nothing in the Bible commands believers to reform or redeem society through government and politics alone, or even mainly. Neither is there any expectation that non-Christians will be converted to the Christian point of view, which can vary on some topics, through politics.” (Cal Thomas, syndicated column )

Mon 07 May 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Browne and I were brought down by fear and hubris: “I am the last person in the world to lecture Lord Browne. But it does not take a genius to identify the similarities between our two disasters - fear and hubris.” (Jonathan Aitken, The Guardian )

Mon 07 May 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Christ, My Bodhisattva: Multinational businessman and politician Ram Gidoomal talks about ‘translating’ the gospel in today’s world: “Business is a uniquely global endeavor. Just on Sunday, I was preaching at my local church and a guy in the congregation came up to me and said, “I’m a New Zealander, I’m working in a salmon business in Chile, and I’m here [in London] just for today, on my way to Norway to see the business owners.” There’s no other field that so closely matches the global nature of God’s mission.” (Christianity Today )

Fri 27 Apr 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Freedom and Slavery: A very important speech. Many possible quotes. Two: “Yet what is consistently striking in much of this [African anti-slavery] literature is the fierceness with which nominal Christianity is assaulted and blamed for the slave trade, and the conviction that authentic Christianity is the most powerful argument against it and in favour of human equality.” And “But [Wilberforce] is campaigning for a moral state—that is, for a state that does not compromise its citizens, and that recognises its own accountability to considerations wider than those of immediate profit and security. He wants government to understand that its policies directly shape the moral status of citizens; public policy creates the world in which particular citizens live their lives, it creates a climate, a set of possibilities, a language and culture of public life or international life.” (Archbishop Rowan Williams, Wilberforce Lecture Trust, Hull, April 2007 )

Wed 25 Apr 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Past Tense: Favorite fictional tales rooted in history: Speaking of poetry as spiritual discipline, that will teach me not to skip the WSJ “Five Best” book recommendation column. Three other blogs called it fortunately to my attention. Novelist Anne Perry comes up with three to which I give hearty assent, and two I’ll now add to my own list. In particular, I too commend Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog to all and sundry for its well-grounded humor and wonderful exploration of divine providence. Perry also, somewhat surprisingly, recommends G. K. Chesterton’s epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse. Ignatius has a good hardcover edition and there are plenty of paperback and online versions, including from Project Gutenberg. Perry says, “It is the meeting of history and myth, a song of undying hope and faith in mankind.” Indeed. Please seek it out.  (Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2007 )

Mon 23 Apr 2007 from Peter Edman • Link & Comments

Ending Quarterly Earnings Guidance?: Senior Fellow Prabhu Guptara wrote last month about short-term thinking too: “Well, anything less than annual guidance encourages short-termism in a marketplace that is already short-term enough.” (Prabhu Guptara, Renaissance blog )

Tue 17 Apr 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

The Maes-Garreau Point: Speaking of “Not in our Time,” just ran across this provocative essay from Kevin Kelly on predictions of the future. 2040, anyone? “In other words we all carry around our own personal mini-singularity, which will happen when we die. It used to be that we could not imagine our existence after our death; now we cannot imagine the details of anyone’s existence after our death. Beyond this personal singularity, life is unknowable. We tend to place our imaginations and predictions before our own Maes-Garreau Point.” (Kevin Kelly, The Technium )

Tue 17 Apr 2007 from Peter Edman • Link & Comments