Gleanings Quick Links

Where the Avatars Roam: “Libertarians hold to a theory of ‘spontaneous order’—that society should be the product of uncoordinated human choices instead of human design. Well, Second Life has plenty of spontaneity, and not much genuine order. This experiment suggests that a world that is only a market is not a utopia. It more closely resembles a seedy, derelict carnival—the triumph of amusement and distraction over meaning and purpose.” (Michael Gerson, The Washington Post )

Mon 09 Jul 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Really Bad Ideas: Population control: “To put it bluntly: it is difficult to celebrate human life in any meaningful way when people – or at least the growth of the number of people – are regarded as the source of the world’s problems. Alongside today’s respect for human life there is the increasingly popular idea that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet.” An excellent discussion of the latent and blatant Malthusian strands in modern thought—can Rwanda really be overpopulated after the genocide? (Frank Furedi, Spiked )

Wed 20 Jun 2007 from Peter Edman • Link & Comments

The Hitchens brothers: Anatomy of a row: ‘Peter, 55, confirms to me that he was implying in his review that Christopher, 58, was closer to religious belief than he had ever accepted. “There is always, in the atheistical struggle with God, the fight against temptation. If it didn’t matter to you, why write a book about how wrong it is? The first person you have to convince with any book you write, is yourself. If you didn’t need convincing… why go to all those lengths?"’ It does seem as though C. Hitchens is in the “doth protest too much” category. Will he, as Kathy Shaidle asks, “do a Muggeridge”? He seems to have the intellectual integrity, if he can get over his emotional commitments. (The Independent )

Fri 15 Jun 2007 from Peter Edman • Link & Comments

Addressing climate change: “As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism. This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the slogans of their protection – similarly to the old Marxists – wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning of the whole world.” (Czech President Václav Klaus, address to the U.S. Congress, March 2007 )

Thu 14 Jun 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

British business leaders are now as spineless as American ones: “Businesses have a moral responsibility to use the power of their investments not only to make money but also to improve matters globally. That is the whole point of their signing up to statements and organisations such as the UN’s Global Compact or participating in exalted events such as the World Economic Forum. If businessmen and businesswomen don’t want to entirely discredit such organisations and institutions, the least they can do is to keep quiet rather than openly show that they are prepared to sacrifice liberty, law, and principle for the sake of profit.” (Prabhu Guptara, Renaissance blog )

Tue 12 Jun 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Europe’s Christian Comeback: “In fact, the rapid decline in the continent’s church attendance over the past 40 years may have done Europe a favor. It has freed churches of trying to operate as national entities that attempt to serve all members of society. Today, no church stands a realistic chance of incorporating everyone. Smaller, more focused bodies, however, can be more passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously committed to personal holiness. To use a scientific analogy, when a star collapses, it becomes a white dwarf—smaller in size than it once was, but burning much more intensely. Across Europe, white-dwarf faith communities are growing within the remnants of the old mass church.” (Philip Jenkins, Foreign Policy )

Tue 12 Jun 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Continental Drift: “Is it possible, then, that the writers who have spent the past few years predicting Europe’s collapse could be wrong? The short answer is: no. Even a corpse has been known to twitch once or twice before the rigor mortis sets in. The longer answer is provided by Walter Laqueur in The Last Days of Europe, one of the more persuasive in a long line of volumes by authors on both sides of the Atlantic chronicling Europe’s decline and foretelling its collapse.” We can still hope. (Gerard Baker, The Times (London) / Wall Street Journal)

Tue 05 Jun 2007 from Peter Edman • Link & Comments

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