Theology That Bites Back
The main category for book reviews and cultural interaction.
“By the end of this century, the demographically doomed Italians and Spaniards will be so few in number there won’t be enough Continental environmentalists left to man the local Greenpeace office. The Belgian climate-change lobbyist will be on the endangered species list with the Himalayan snow leopard. And, from an American point of view, the …
“In Nietzsche, the ethic of transgression has been stripped of scenes of explicit sexual torture and destruction and raised to an alluring intellectual Valhalla of lyric philosophy. We have no evidence that Nietzsche ever read the divine marquis. Nevertheless, the philosopher of the Overman offers a modified product with enhanced appeal for some: Sade without …
This is an absolutely amazing bit of juggling. As my father-in-law says, “Who has more fun than people?” HT: David Field
While their benefits have no doubt been many, church pageants have also had the unfortunate result of making us think that biblical characters did little more than stand around in their bathrobes. The first time someone graduates from such images to an “actual read” through the Old Testament, the effect can be more than a …
“What’s the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What’s the most popular baby boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden? Mohammed. By 2005, it was the fifth most popular boy’s name in the United Kingdom” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 6).
“The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge” (Lord Acton, as quoted in Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, p. 236).
“This is far enough for you to go in judging your brother: ‘Were I in his condition, should I do as he does, I should go against my light. I should act against my conscience.’ But therefore to conclude that he goes against his light, and acts dishonorably, is very sinful. Many carnal men think …
Steyn comments on “the belated realization among Europeans that they’re elderly and fading and that their Muslim populations are young and surging, and in all these clashes the latter are putting down markers for the way things will be the day after tomorrow” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 5).
“In its impact on people’s behavior and sense of ‘alienation’ and by its apparent sincerity of feeling, The Stranger came close to becoming the mid-twentieth century equivalent of Goethe’s best-selling The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which provoked hundreds of suicides all over Europe” (Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, p. 161).
The third chapter of Crunchy Cons is on food. In it Dreher describes his move away from his old way of thinking, where food was simply “ballast, and nothing more” (p. 57). Even while he is describing how food became more and more important to him and his wife, he is able to disarm objections …
