“The revolutionaries simply put to their own use the libido that Versailles had unleashed. Sade, who more explicitly than any other in France described and reveled in the link between pornography and political revolution, was not an aberration of eighteenth-century French culture, but the culmination of the French predilection for pornography” (E. Michael Jones, Monsters …
No Unique Logres
I want to begin this next section of my review of Gelernter’s Americanism with a healthy reminder from C.S. Lewis. This comes from That Hideous Strength. “So that, meanwhile, is England,” said Mother Dimble. “Just this swaying to and fro between Logres and Britain?” “Yes,” said her husband. “Don’t you feel it? The very quality …
Facts Be Stubborn
Turns out that fewer than half of scientists who have published on climate change in the last few years believe that there is something to the global warming hooey. Looky here. Turns out that the icebergs may not be melting, and that the totali-science that some are trying to practice these days may be melting. …
An Earlier 9-11
“Finally, they besieged Vienna again, only to be turned back by Poland’s King Jan III Sobieski and thirty thousand Polish hussars on a day that marks the high point of Muslim expansion in Europe: September 11, 1683” (Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), p. 157).
Horror as Cultural Guilt
“The fact that the creator of the horror genre is celebrated as a proponent of sexual liberation indicates that our culture still does not understand horror. If our culture could make up its mind about sexual liberation, it would not need horror. It would either embrace sexual license wholeheartedly, as Mary’s husband did, or repudiate …
Monsters or Sinners?
Chapter Five is where David Gelernter and I part company most drastically, for reasons easily anticipated. In this chapter, Gelernter tackles the subject of Abraham Lincoln, “America’s last and greatest founding father.” As usual, Gelernter is uncannily accurate in his description, and flies wide of the mark in his evaluation. Lincoln was the great founder …
Heaven Forbid
“However strange it may seem to Westerners, the much-publicized virgins promised to Islamic martyrs in Paradise is no myth or distortion of Islamic theology. Muhammad painted a picture of a frankly material and lushly sensual Paradise for his followers—containing everything a seventh-century Arabian desert-dweller could possibly dream of: gold and fine material things, fruits, wine, …
Self-Authenticating Ultimacy
“Hence the late-romantic tendency to insist on a total separation between the aesthetic and the moral; and finally the modernist tendency to grant art the ultimate legitimacy and authority that were previously reserved for morality” (Martha Bayles, Hole in our Soul, pp. 389).
It Shouldn’t Be Either
“Jesus tells us that the hireling does not care for the sheep the way a good shepherd does. In saying this, the Lord was teaching in effect that the ministry cannot be allowed to become a profession. Despite this severe warning, the modern Church has steadily drifted into a compromise with what we might call …
Taking Temp Work to Extremes
“Shi’ite Islam, the dominant form of Islam in Iran, also allows for ‘temporary wives.’ This is a provision for men to gain female companionship on a short-term basis. In a temporary marriage, or mut’a, the couple signs a marriage agreement that is ordinary in every respect except that it carries a time limit. One tradition …