History

The Dark Ages: Pagans Turned Out the Lights, Not The Church

Dark Ages: Pagans Turned Out the Lights, Not The Churchby Fr. Lawrence Farley –
The Dark Ages, insofar as they were dark, were darkened by the barbarian invasions that inundated the western Roman Empire, and that it was only in the Church and monasteries that any light was preserved.

Among the literature of those who make it their main business to vilify the Christians, perhaps no concept has served a more useful purpose than the idea of “the Dark Ages.” The Dark Ages, according to this reading of history, were those centuries in which the Church was culturally ascendant, with the inevitable result that civilization sunk into superstition, ignorance, obscurantism, and moral decadence. Here everything that was bad about the world is laid at the Church’s door, especially the decline of Science (with a capital “S”), which apparently had been going great guns until the Church took over.

As evidence of the Church’s war against Science, enlightenment, tolerance, and reason in general, the name of Galileo is usually bandied about, along with the notion that everyone in the Dark Ages thought that the world was flat. It was from this ecclesiastical abyss that Science eventually pulled us all out, saving the world from the Church and restoring civilization. But as we talk about the Dark Ages, it is worth asking how the Roman Empire of the west came to be so dark in the first place? [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

The Mayflower’s Pilgrim Capitalists

RealClearMarkets | by Steven Malanga | Nov. 25, 2009

Reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, an account of the voyage of the Pilgrims and the settling of Plymouth Colony, what strikes me most is not simply the extraordinary suffering of those who made the crossing, or how close to failure the entire venture teetered for years, or even the author’s recounting of the first celebration we’ve since dubbed Thanksgiving.

What leaps out from the pages of the history, probably because it’s so little a part of the common narrative of the Pilgrims, is a crucial decision by the colony’s governor, William Bradford, to change the fundamental organization of Plymouth’s economy, a move which secured the colony’s future. As Philbrick describes it, after three years in America the Pilgrims “stumbled on the power of capitalism” and in the process ensured the colony’s survival. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Something Wicked This Way Comes

AmericanThinker | J.C. Smith | March 15, 2009

The darkest times in human history have all begun when someone decided “not to let a serious crisis go to waste”. In fact, it is in times of economic crisis that folks are most susceptible to the ideas of tyrants. We look for an answer, any port in a storm that will shield us from the unknown. And in our desire to be safe, we open ourselves up to things that we would never have dreamed of allowing in normal times. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

The Light of Hope in Darkness

American Thinker | Bruce Walker | Dec. 23, 2008

In the Mumbai Massacre terrorists particularly targeted Jews, focusing special attention of the Chabad house. The Holocaust denial in Iran and the proliferation of literary outrages like The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion or monstrous tracts like Mein Kampf, are sad proof that hatred of Jews is not limited to terrorists operating in India. The chic Leftists of Europe unite with terrorists in their reflexive hatred of Israel and unspoken anti-Semitism.

Grimly, not just anti-Semitism found violent expression in the generally placid India. This year alone, more than 100 Christians have been murdered in anti-Christian riots on the subcontinent. The ancient Christian community in Iraq is facing slow extermination. The defamation of Christian faith in elite salons has never been more gleeful than now. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Slouching Toward Statism

Townhall.com | George Will | July 8, 2007

WASHINGTON — Some mornings during the autumn of 1933, when the unemployment rate was 22 percent, the president, before getting into his wheelchair, sat in bed, surrounded by economic advisers, setting the price of gold. One morning he said he might raise it 21 cents: “It’s a lucky number because it’s three times seven.” His treasury secretary wrote that if anybody knew how gold was priced “they would be frightened.”

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Hitting the Wall

Wall Street Opinion Journal | John Fund | June 11, 2007

Reagan’s prophetic Berlin speech, 20 years later.

Rip Van Winkle has nothing on Jan Grzebski, a Polish railway worker who just emerged from a coma that began 19 years ago–just prior to the collapse of communism in his country. His take on how the world around him has changed beyond recognition comes at an appropriate time. It was 20 years ago tomorrow that Ronald Reagan electrified millions behind the Iron Curtain by standing in front of the Berlin Wall demanding: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

A Journey That Will Come Full Circle and End With a Ring

New York Times (free registration required) Sergei Kivrin March 21, 2007

Danilov Monastery bellsAt the Danilov Monastery in Moscow, Hierodeacon Roman, a bell ringer, may be able ring the tower’s original bells by next year.

MOSCOW, March 20 — The bells of Lowell House at Harvard — so much a part of the university’s tradition that they have their own society of bell ringers — will soon return to the Russian monastery from which they were sold more than 70 years ago.

The Russian Orthodox Church and the university announced a final agreement on Tuesday to move the bells next year to Danilov Monastery, the residence of the Russian patriarch, after a replacement set for Harvard is completed.

The bells have become a symbol for the resurgence of the Orthodox Church and its drive, much like Russia’s, to reclaim its former glory.

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

The Pope, the President and the Prime Minister Who Changed the World

Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute Susan Yoshihara

(NEW YORK — C-FAM) A prominent journalist has argued recently that international political, economic and social breakdown were largely averted during the 1980’s due to the personal and political alignments between Pope John Paul II, President Ronald Reagan, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In his recently-released book, The Pope, The President, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, National Review Editor-at-Large and Hudson Institute Fellow John O’Sullivan offers new research illuminating the three “hopeful” and “confident” personalities, and the way they forged relationships of mutual trust through their alliances and disagreements in a period of international upheaval and personal trial.

Crediting Reagan and Thatcher for reversing the economic “malaise,” stagflation, and defeatism in the American and British collective psyche, O’Sullivan chronicles the political risks both Thatcher and Reagan took to transform the world economy into a post-industrial, information-age economy that today has achieved “eighteen years of high growth with stable prices, scarcely interrupted by two mild and shallow recessions.”

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail