Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, RIP: A great thinker and human being has died. See this First Things posting for some details and links. See her conversion story too, which touches especially on the cultural assumptions she encountered in the process, and the thinking that brought her to Jesus and his church. One quote: “It seemed difficult to imagine a world in which each followed his or her personal moral compass, if only because the morality of some was bound, sooner or later, to clash with the morality of others. And without some semblance of a common standard, those clashes were more than likely to end in one or another form of violence.” Too much to summarize. Take a few minutes and read. (First Things)
Mon 08 Jan 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
Worth Saving: Essential books for understanding Christianity: Weigel's list is worth attention for seekers and believers alike. (George Weigel, Wall Street Journal)
Mon 08 Jan 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
A dangerous obsession: ‘Lofty talk about "social justice" or "fairness" boils down to greatly expanded powers for politicians, since those pretty words have no concrete definition. They are a blank check for creating disparities in power that dwarf disparities in income—and are far more dangerous.’ First in an important five-part series of columns starting December 26, 2006. (Thomas Sowell, Creators Syndicate)
Tue 02 Jan 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
The Dawkins delusion: “While Dawkins can readily identify common features between South Pacific cargo cults and the Christian churches, he seems oblivious to the religious themes of the environmental movement. Just like evangelical Christians, environmentalists preach a ‘repent, the end is nigh’ message.” (Michael Fitzpatrick, Spiked)
Tue 02 Jan 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
Dogma Without God: Fallen angels assault heaven at Christmas: “Atheists and the unchurched undervalue the extent to which they are getting a free ride on the social strength that religious-based virtue provides. It's one thing to write in a book that we don't need them. But I'd rather not run the real-world experiment of navigating without them.” (Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal)
Tue 02 Jan 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
Are you certain about that?: “Certainty has become code among the intellectual priesthood for people and ideas that can be dismissed out of hand. That's what is so offensive about this fashionable nonsense: It breeds the very closed-mindedness it pretends to fight.” Read it all. (Jonah Goldberg, syndicated column)
Tue 02 Jan 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
And merry Xmas to you all: “What the rabbi in Seattle and the cops in Riverside are doing is colluding in an assault on something more basic: They're denying the possibility of any common culture.” (Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times)
Tue 19 Dec 2006 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
Anthropologist Foresees a Christian Renaissance: “French anthropologist René Girard, one of the most influential intellectuals of contemporary culture, thinks that a Christian Renaissance lies ahead. In a book published recently in Italian, "Verità o fede debole. Dialogo su cristianesimo e relativismo" (Truth or Weak Faith: Dialogue on Christianity and Relativism), the anthropologist states that 'we will live in a world that will seem and be as Christian as today it seems scientific.' ” (ZENIT news service)
Mon 18 Dec 2006 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
Podcast on P. D. James: A December edition of Ken Myers’ podcast covers the work of mystery novelist P. D. James, the author behind this month's feature film, Children of Men. It's worth your time, particularly if you've never read James. One-half hour. (Mars Hill Audio)
Tue 12 Dec 2006 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
A Conversation with British Philosopher Roger Scruton: Roger Scruton, a new Trinity Forum Senior Fellow and "England's most notorious philosopher," sits for an interview with Canada's CBC Radio on December 10, 2006. (link to audio) (RealAudio from Sunday Edition, CBC)
Tue 12 Dec 2006 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
The Good Book Business: “There is also concern that Bible publishers, for all their marketing ingenuity, have outsmarted themselves. Tim Jordan said, ‘There’s been research that has shown that half the people who come into a Christian bookstore intending to buy a Bible, with money in their pocket, leave without one, because they get overwhelmed.’” Also: “The problem, as she sees it, is that ‘instead of demanding that the believer, the reader, the seeker step out from the culture and become more Christian, more enclosed within ecclesial definition, we’re saying, “You stay in the culture and we’ll come to you.” And, therefore, how are we going to separate out the culturally transient and trashy from the eternal?’” A good discussion. The ESV blog link has other commentary. Worth pondering. (Daniel Radosh, The New Yorker (via ESV Bible Blog))
Tue 12 Dec 2006 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
It is not a crime to hold traditional values: “If disagreement is to be silenced because offence may be caused, that is not good for intellectual life; it personalises and 'psychologises' all conflict of ideas and denies the possibility of appropriate detachment in debating issues. . . . [A] moral challenge to someone on the grounds of their choices is a tribute to human dignity: if I challenge what you do, I take you seriously as a moral agent, a free person whose choices matter, whether they are about sex, money, or whether to take a job in the [Ministry of Defence].” (Rowan Williams, Times Higher Education Supplement)
Mon 11 Dec 2006 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
God Rest Ye Merry: “Our Christmas carols are among the most precious shared possessions of our fragmenting, fraying culture, and for all that we abuse them and demean them, they seem to remain imperishable.” A lovely editorial on the darkness of Christmas from one of our new Senior Fellows. (This album from the Taverner Consort—also on iTunes—has a lovely version of the carol that may help you hear it anew.) (Wilfred M. McClay, Touchstone)
Wed 06 Dec 2006 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
Deadly Atheism?: Speaking of atheism: “Take a look at Russia, however, and you see a country with decades more experience of atheism than Western Europe, and a far more advanced case of demographic decline. To be sure, there are plenty of confounding factors that need to be acknowledged and accounted for. But as a candidate for the case that atheism has serious real-world costs, Russia is at the top of the list.” There's a link to a 2003 National Interest article that may be of interest too. (Stanley Kurtz, The Corner on National Review Online)
Wed 06 Dec 2006 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
Losing the Enlightenment: A civilization that has lost confidence in itself cannot confront the Islamists. “Somehow Europeans have ever so insidiously given up the promise of the Enlightenment that welcomed free thought of all kinds, the more provocative the better.” (Victor Davis Hanson, The Claremont Institute, via WSJ)
Tue 05 Dec 2006 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments
It is one of Wilberforce’s most powerful insights—as it was of St Augustine many centuries earlier—that injustice damages the oppressor spiritually as much as it damages the oppressed materially.
Rowan Williams, April 2007
China’s Olympics: The Earthquake Dividend
The Renaissance and Religious Toleration
Zimbabwe, the Scandal of Africa
Russert and the Crystal Ball Media
Dear Kid: Die Now. Thanks, The Planet
Sovereignty: God, State, and Self by Jean Bethke Elshtain.
Elshtain examines the origins and meanings of “sovereignty” as it relates to the ways we attempt to explain our world: God, state, and self.
The Long Road to Forgiveness: “On June 8, 1972, I ran out from Cao Dai temple in my village, Trang Bang, South Vietnam; I saw an airplane getting lower and then four bombs falling down. I saw fire everywhere around me. Then I saw the fire over my body, especially on my left arm. My clothes had been burned off by fire. I was 9 years old but I still remember my thoughts at that moment: I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way.” (Kim Phuc, NPR , 2008 07 01)
The Little Robot That Could: “Stanton: No, it always works backward. It’s more like, Wow, look what this sort of feels like. So you run with those things, because they’re very primal. In my mind they’re very much in the core of our storytelling. So much of the Old Testament is sort of built into our DNA. I’ve read other stories where you’ve talked about your Christian faith a bit. Can you tell me how your faith informs your creativity and your work? Stanton: They tell you that as a storyteller, it’s vital to just stick with and be honest with your values system. The last thing I want to do is go to a movie and feel like I’m being preached to or being told how to be, and I think it’s more honest—and you’re going to have more effect—to be truthful with the values of your characters, working off of your own values. That was the case with WALL•E. The greatest commandment is to love one another, and to me, that’s the ultimate purpose of living. So that was the perfect goal for the loneliest robot on earth, to learn the greatest commandment, to learn to love.” (Mark Moring interviewing Andrew Stanton, director of Pixar’s WALL-E, for Christianity Today , 2008 07 01)
Never Mind Machiavelli: ‘Of course, there was plenty of ambition. But with Washington, it was always tempered by a sense of honor. Where many of his more sophisticated contemporaries sought Machiavellian political guidance from “The Prince,” Washington looked to the Roman philosopher Seneca—not to find shortcuts to success but “to know how he should behave, and how other men had behaved in positions of power and times of stress.” (Aram Bakshian, Jr. on George Washington on Leadership by Richard Brookhiser in The Wall Street Journal , 2008 06 30)
A Stirring Defense of the Conversation: “The humanities are supposed to “give young people the opportunity and encouragement to put themselves—their values and commitments—into a critical perspective,” yet if the notion that class, race, and gender are absolutely determinative becomes an article of faith, then the very possibility of transcending one’s prejudices is ruled out.” (James Seaton, reviewing Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman, in The University Bookman , 2008 06 30)
• Let My People Go, AIDS Profiteers (2008 06 30)
• Between Obedience and Obedience (2008 06 26)
• Why Me? The case against the sovereign self (2008 06 25)
• Cities for Living (2008 06 25)
• Theophobia (2008 06 20)
Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past by Wilfred M. McClay.
Essays.
