OrthodoxNet.com Blog

Daily Mail | Peter Hitchens | June 2, 2007 |

Am I my brother’s reviewer? A word of explanation is needed here. Some of you may know that I have a brother, Christopher, who disagrees with me about almost everything.

Some of those who read his books and articles also know that I exist, though they often dislike me if so. But in general we inhabit separate worlds – in more ways than one.

He is of the Left, lives in the United States and recently became an American citizen. I am of the Right and, after some years in Russia and America, live in the heart of England. Occasionally we clash in public.

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Townhall.com Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr, MD December 4, 2006

Like all other human beings, the modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he values and devalues, in what he articulates with passion. Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation. It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical role of morality in human relating. The liberal agenda does not comprehend an identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of private charity. It does not learn history’s lessons on the evils of collectivism.

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Ed. If Will’s review is accurate, this might be worth a read. It seems to capture the temper of the time.

Townhall.com George Will September 10, 2006

Before the dust from the collapsed towers had settled, conventional wisdom had congealed: “Everything has changed.” But what about what matters most, the public’s sensibility?

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Wall Street Opinion Journal Nick Schulz August 2, 2006

Ideas have consequences, which Malthus never quite understood.

For a long time, economists believed that much of their job was to analyze a world of scarcity, the grim business of harvesting limited resources and distributing too few goods to too many people. And then there was the matter of decreasing returns to additional investment. Such returns were once “a familiar topic in economics,” David Warsh tells us in “Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.” After all, “even the richest coal vein plays out.”

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Christianity Today July 31
Jason Bailey

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government, according to a book to be released later this month by Westminster John Knox Press—a division of the denominational publisher for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action is the third book on the subject by David Ray Griffin, a professor emeritus of theology at Claremont School of Theology who is also a well-published and prominent process theologian.

His previous work has influenced Kevin Barrett, a Muslim lecturer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has received recent national attention for espousing the theory. Of the 133 members in Wisconsin’s legislature, 61 signed a letter to university officials and Gov. James Doyle demanding that Barrett be fired before the fall term begins. He is scheduled to teach about some of the conspiracy theories surrounding September 11 during his 15-week fall course, “Islam: Religion and Culture.”

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Christianity Today Eugene McCarraher

Breaking the marriage between heaven and earth.

On a sunny March morning in 1962, a taxi bearing Hannah Arendt collided with a truck as it sped across Central Park. Awakening in the ambulance, Arendt moved her limbs, rolled her eyes, and tested her memory by recalling decades, stanzas of poetry, and telephone numbers. As she later described the episode to her close friend Mary McCarthy, “for a fleeting moment I had the feeling that it was up to me whether I wanted to live or die.” While she “did not think that death was terrible,” she also thought that “life was quite beautiful and that I rather like it.”

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Origins of Presentism, review by William Anthony Hay

Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism, and History, by J.C.D. Clark, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. 336 pp.

HISTORY RETAINS A PROFOUND HOLD on the human imagination as individuals and societies alike define themselves by coming to terms with their past. Today, however, a general shift in assumptions about the role of the past in the developed world has changed the relationship of cultures with their history. Events are now located only in the present tense. Having lost touch with a history that provided meaning, Western societies now grapple confusedly with questions of identity.

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Wall Street Opinion Journal BY JOHN J. MILLER Tuesday, June 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

H.G. Wells was a sci-fi pioneer, but his political ideas were abominable.

If H.G. Wells had not performed poorly on an astronomical physics test and several other exams as a young man, he might have spent the rest of his life as an obscure academic rather than a popular author. He probably would not have written his most famous book, “The War of the Worlds”–a novel that’s never gone out of print since its publication in 1898 and that now serves as the inspiration for the Stephen Spielberg film reaching theaters next Wednesday.

Those lousy marks at the Normal School of Science in London’s South Kensington are perhaps one of the best things that ever happened to the original Martian chronicler. Wells himself didn’t see them that way. He bore a deep grudge. In an 1895 story, “The Argonauts of the Air,” his protagonists slam a “flying machine” into the Royal College of Science (as the Normal School had been renamed), causing explosions and fatalities. It’s difficult to interpret the episode as something other than a morbid act of literary terrorism.

Even this didn’t flush the anger out of his system. Three years later, in “The War of the Worlds,” Wells unleashed those iconic tripods and their devastating heat rays on his old stomping ground. In a letter, he boasted of “selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity.”

Perhaps the professors got the message and began to practice grade inflation. Whatever the case, the author’s lingering resentment highlights one of the central aspects of his work: He simply couldn’t accept the world he encountered in his everyday life. Disappointments often sparked a destructive urge. The man was nothing if not a radical who yearned to reshape the fundamentals of human society through books and politics.

Natan Sharansky was a Soviet dissident who fought for the rights of Jews, particulary Jewish immigrant, against his Soviet oppressors. He was jailed for seven years but eventually prevailed. Currently he lives in Israel. Sharansky argues in “The Case for Democracy” that all oppressed people yearn for freedom. He makes a compelling historical and moral case that American foreign policy should link relations with tyrants to how they treat their own people — just as Reagan did with the Soviet Union. Such linkage, Sharansky argues, will allow potential dissidents who will work to lessen the oppression to emerge. This book makes a compelling moral case for reform through an activist foreign policy by America and other free nations by a man who possesses the moral authority to make it.