Popular culture

Audrey Ignatoff

I have written about the devil before, but always in a metaphorical way. However, I now feel that an evil force has come too close to home. Even this embattled “health care warrior” was shocked to the core to learn that school children in my district were being taken on a trip to see an exhibit called “Body Worlds” at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. This goes against all religious and ethical beliefs in the civilized world, and has given me nightmares from just looking at the website.

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American Vision Eric Rauch

Liberal politics is at a crossroads. Humanism is being attacked by way of the Intelligent Design movement. If biological Darwinism can be shown to be nothing more than a philosophy that gives meaning to the facts, then, by implication, humanists are left in the lake without a paddle. The Darwinists hold fast to their “first principles” as tenaciously as most Christians, and yet we are the ones who get ridiculed for having a “silly, wishful-thinking faith.” Two recent articles by British authors exemplify this point forcefully.

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Hugh Davies
Daily Telegraph, UK

Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, is to face a High Court action brought by the authors of the 1982 non-fiction book The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail, who allege that his blockbuster was based on their decade of research.

Speaking ahead of a preliminary hearing of the case next week, Richard Leigh, 62, one of the writers, said: “I don’t begrudge Brown his success. I have no particular grievance against him, except for the fact that he wrote a pretty bad novel.”

Mr Leigh, an American who has lived in England since 1974, and Michael Baigent, 57, a New Zealander, his co-author, are suing Random House, Brown’s publishers, for infringement of their ideas.

They are funding the action with the proceeds of their book, which Random House has reissued in a special hardback edition to cash in on the success of Brown’s novel.

Henry Lincoln, 75, a Londoner who also co-wrote the book, is ill and has decided to remain out of the action.

A two-week trial is scheduled for the end of February, with both sides assembling formidable legal teams.

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Novelist Anne Rice leaves the vampire Lestat and embraces Christ, “the ultimate supernatural hero” | by Lynn Vincent

Though she is a novelist, Anne Rice sees the world the way a painter might, in subtleties of light and shadow: the pale edge of dawn, the flat ink of a starless midnight, goodness for some an elusive beacon, evil an alluring shroud.

She was known for shrouds. Mrs. Rice spent nearly three decades sculpting a reputation as literary queen of the damned—and now, at age 64, she has declared that canon closed. After rejecting her Catholic faith nearly half a century ago, she says she is reconciled with God and dedicating the rest of her life to writing only for—and about—Jesus Christ.

Her first novel of this kind, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf), hit stores on Nov. 1. The first-person narrative of Jesus as a young boy follows Jesus from His family’s hiding in Egypt back to Jerusalem and Nazareth, where He slowly learns His true identity. The story emanates the light of nascent majesty, in stark contrast with the gaslight gloom of Mrs. Rice’s earlier work, and is the first in a projected series.

An interesting statement:

…Mrs. Rice’s research took her through the literature written by those she calls “the skeptical critics,” beginning with the New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment. “I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud,” she writes in an author’s note in her new book.

But she plowed on, “ready to risk everything,” particularly her newly recovered faith: “The skeptical New Testament scholarship tries to prove to you that the Gospels don’t hold up. It takes great fortitude to subject yourself to that kind of literature, to seriously take notes, to follow the arguments, to draw conclusions. You could come out destroyed.” But she came out concluding that the skeptics were wrong, perpetrators and victims of some of the worst scholarship she’d ever seen, built with poor research and reasoning on a foundation that presumed the Gospels weren’t true.

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The Left frequently defines ‘social justice’ differently than Judeo-Christian values do. For most on the Left, ‘social justice’ means social equality and social fairness. It is not fair that some people have more than others. This is why the Left believes that courts should be far more than umpires when adjudicating justice: they should be promoting fairness and equality. The other difference…is that leftist ideologies are so preoccupied with ‘social justice’ that they generally ignore personal character development. Judeo-Christian values believe the road to a just society is paved by individual character development; the Left believes it is paved with action on a macro level. That is one reason the Left is far more interested than the Right, i.e., religious Jews and Christians and secular conservatives, in passing laws, whether through legislation or through the actions of judges. That is how the Left believes you make a better society. There is, incidentally, a second reason the Left passes so many laws: As the Left breaks down the self-discipline of Judeo-Christian religions, more and more laws are needed simply to keep people from devouring each other.

Wall Street Journal Online WENDY SHALIT

Ariel Levy attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, and she doesn’t feel the better for it. It was a place where “group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was de rigueur.” It was a place where they had “coed showers, on principle.” When Ms. Levy suggested to a department head that it would be nice to have at least one course in the traditional literary canon, she was dismissed with icy contempt. Yet elsewhere on campus a professor of the humanities taught a course on pornography featuring, um, detailed textual analysis.

It was all supposed to be so liberating. But it wasn’t, as Ms. Levy argues forcefully in “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” It was merely the academic groundwork for what she calls “raunch culture,” now so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Young women wear shirts emblazoned with “Porn Star” across the chest. Teen stores sell “Cat in the Hat” thong underwear. Parents treat their daughters’ friends to “cardio striptease” classes for birthday parties. This is liberation?

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TownHall.com Robert Rector

Each year, more than 3 million teenagers contract a sexually transmitted disease. In addition to the threat of disease and pregnancy, sexually active teens are three times more likely than teens who aren’t sexually active to become depressed and to attempt suicide.

Clearly, it’s in society’s interest to discourage teen sex. Teens themselves realize this: According to a Zogby poll, more than 90 percent of them say that society should teach kids to abstain from sex until they have, at least, finished high school. Parents want a stronger message: Almost nine in 10 want schools to teach youth to abstain from sex until they’re married or in an adult relationship that is close to marriage.