All entries by this author

The Cardinal loses the thread

May 9th, 2008 2:09 pm | By

Priestly wisdom.

[I]n Britain today there is considerable spiritual homelessness…Many people have a sense of being in a sort of exile from faith-guided experience…To some extent this is the effect of the privatisation of religion today: religion comes to be treated as a matter of personal need rather than as a truth that makes an unavoidable claim on us.

Yes. That’s because it’s not a truth that makes an unavoidable claim on us. It sounds pretty to say that, but it isn’t true. (The ‘unavoidable claim’ is largely a matter of childhood imprinting. People who aren’t imprinted don’t experience the claim as unavoidable.)

The Cardinal loses the thread quite easily, and quickly.

‘Pope Benedict knows,’ he said, ‘that religion

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Katha Pollitt on Dr. Phyllis Schlafly *

May 9th, 2008 | Filed by

Washington University is giving Phyllis Schlafly an honorary doctorate. Yes really.… Read the rest



Cardinal’s Lecture [click ‘Transcript’] *

May 9th, 2008 | Filed by

‘Have you ever met anyone who believes what Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in?’ Yes.… Read the rest



God Mysterious, Cardinal Says *

May 9th, 2008 | Filed by

‘If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always tentative.’… Read the rest



Terry Sanderson on Cormac Murphy-O’Connor *

May 9th, 2008 | Filed by

‘You are a politician as much as a priest, but no one has elected you.’… Read the rest



Resist the Medievalists *

May 9th, 2008 | Filed by

The pro-choice lobby has no pulpits to marshal its troops.… Read the rest



All the Tom-Toms of the Global Village

May 9th, 2008 | By Andrzej Koraszewski (translated by Malgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson)

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Our civilization is a civilization of fear. Walk into any bookshop and look at the titles – horrors assail you from all sides; open a newspaper, check how many headlines try to awake in you a feeling, if not of mortal fear at least of anxiety; take a notebook and a stopwatch to your evening news and write down how many times during one evening you are told about violence, disasters, crimes, and suppositions that aim to trigger your fear, flight impulse, or “righteous” anger.

Newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations are waging a deadly battle over who can frighten you more. Every day specialists check to … Read the rest



Undercover Atheist Joins Hagee’s Church *

May 8th, 2008 | Filed by

Christian Zionism aims to align America with Israel so as to ‘hurry God up’ with Armageddon… Read the rest



Bush Cites God in Defending War Actions *

May 8th, 2008 | Filed by

His policies were predicated on the belief that ‘every human being bears the image of our maker.’… Read the rest



MF Husain’s Work Ruled Not Obscene *

May 8th, 2008 | Filed by

Hindu nationalist groups accused him of ‘hurting their religious sentiments.’… Read the rest



Malaysian Woman Allowed to Leave Islam *

May 8th, 2008 | Filed by

That’s against the law in Malaysia, but the judge decided she had never actually converted.… Read the rest



Bogus Anti-elitism *

May 8th, 2008 | Filed by

Pseudo-populist suspicion of them there expurts is not the way to stay in the reality-based community.… Read the rest



God 1 or god 2

May 7th, 2008 12:30 pm | By

I kept going on arguing in that discussion at CfI yesterday, and in doing that I tried to boil down the point of contention to make it as clear as possible.

There are two possibilities for theists here.

1) There is a god who is transcendent, outside of nature, outside of the universe.

2) There is a god who is descendent, inside nature, inside the universe, and who makes things happen in our world.

There are different things to say about each. About 1, nearly everyone would agree that it’s not possible to offer evidence that such a god does not exist. But theists fail to draw the rest of the obvious conclusion: for the same reason that it’s not … Read the rest



Sleeper on Wieseltier on Amis *

May 7th, 2008 | Filed by

Wieseltier’s review is preening and melodramatic, an opera bouffe of a literary attack.… Read the rest



The Mystical Fallacies of a Hero of the Right *

May 7th, 2008 | Filed by

Hayek is not as rational and irrefutable as the right would have it. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist. … Read the rest



Pragna Patel on the Problem with Multifaithism *

May 7th, 2008 | Filed by

At the heart of all fundamentalist movements is support for the patriarchal family.… Read the rest



Multifaithism is Bad for Women *

May 7th, 2008 | Filed by

The multicultural approach harms women; it focuses on relations between groups, rather than within them. … Read the rest



Girls’ School Burnt Down in Swat District *

May 7th, 2008 | Filed by

Another girls school had petrol bombs thrown at it on Sunday.… Read the rest



How Forced Marriage Works *

May 6th, 2008 | Filed by

She loved her parents, they didn’t beat her, but she gave in to the incessant pleadings.… Read the rest



Jesus and Mo Ponder the FLDS *

May 6th, 2008 | Filed by

Mo is shocked, shocked.… Read the rest