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Items on Global development, immigration, environmentalism, wealth and poverty, and so on

Muslims Outnumber World’s Catholics: "It is true that while Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer,” the monsignor said. Formenti said that the data refer to 2006. The figures on Muslims were put together by Muslim countries and then provided to the United Nations, he said, adding that the Vatican could only vouch for its own data. When considering all Christians and not just Catholics, Christians make up 33 percent of the world population, Formenti said. (Associated Press )

Mon 31 Mar 2008 • Responses: 0 • from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Jacques Barzun Centennary: Critic and essayist Jacques Barzun turned 100 this September: “Barzun may be the very exemplar of the enlightened and humble humanist, and he long ago cut down to the core of the greatest difficulty in modern schooling: if we want young people to be humanized by the knowledge they acquire, they must be taught by humanists—that is, by those who themselves have been humanized by that same knowledge, who have been, in a word, changed, and changed for the better, by what they know.” (Tracy Lee Simmons, The University Bookman )

Mon 26 Nov 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

The ‘New Victorians’: ‘Wendy Shalit, who earlier wrote about “A Return to Modesty,” has a new book called “Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good.” She illustrates the point with an interview with the daughter of Erica Jong, whose book “Fear of Flying” practically launched the sexual revolution. Jong glamorized promiscuity as random guilt-free sex with strangers. “When you’re 12,” says Molly Jong Fast, “there’s nothing funny about your mother’s fourth wedding.” Molly describes her own promiscuity as a mistake. “I was sold a bad bill of goods.” Molly is married and signs her e-mails “mother of Max,” making sure you understand that she’s first a mother. So do a lot of other young moms.’ (Suzanne Fields, syndicated column )

Mon 23 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

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

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

Painfully low horizons for the world’s poor: It’s generally helpful to question a dominant cultural mood. “Sachs has played a key role in transforming the contemporary mood of pessimism into a coherent intellectual system. He has used his considerable intellectual and oratorical gifts to develop an outlook of profoundly low expectations in relation to eradicating global poverty. The celebrity economist is a fitting prophet for our miserable age.” (Daniel Ben-Ami, Spiked )

Thu 12 Apr 2007 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments