“Nearly 100 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in America, and 130 years after all slaves within the British Empire were set free by parliamentary decree, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, in 1962, and Mauritania in 1980, begrudgingly removed legalized slavery from their statute books. And this only after international pressure was brought …
Parasitic Creativity
“The problem of upholding virtue and denouncing vice without appearing priggish, killjoy, bigoted, and narrow-minded has become so acute that intellectuals are now inclined either to deny that there is a distinction between the two or to invert their value. There is no higher word of praise in an art critic’s vocabulary, for example, than …
When Sin and Death Build the City
I enjoyed getting to meet Darryl Hart at the Auburn Avenue conference last year, and also enjoyed our discussion on the Federal Vision over at De Regno Christi. He’s a good guy, and has many valuable things to offer the church, particularly in the realm of historical analysis. But in our discussion at DRC, the …
The Servant Vote
The political process that we have in this country was greatly influenced by the Church in generations past, and it continues to be influenced by Christians today. But the influence we used to have and the influence we have today are very different. The whole idea of representative government was established in the Church long …
Slavery and Islam
“While much has been written concerning the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, surprisingly little attention has been given to the Islamic slaver trade across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. While the European involvement in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Americas lasted for just over three centuries, the Arab involvement in the slave …
Inverted Sentimentality
“The idea that, after an event such as the Great War, an artistic celebration of the world is no longer possible is nonsense, compounded of strangely twisted romanticism and inverted sentimentality . . . But this is simply a pose: supposing an Adorno-like figure had said, ‘After the war, sexual pleasure is no longer possible,’ …
Disposable Wives
“Divorce is accepted as a part of life in Islamic culture. A man could divorce his wife by saying three times, ‘I divorce you.’ But he can choose to marry her again. However, if he also says, ‘You are like my mother to me,’ then this is a permanent divorce and he cannot marry her …
Legions of Untalented Hacks
“The logic of an arms race came to rule in art: and legions of untalented hacks who came after Miro devoted themselves to thinking about what had never been done before rather than about what they wanted to express” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 121).
Women and the Prophet
“Even as a child growing up in Egypt, I chafed at the way Muslim society treated women. As I studied the Quran and Islamic history, I could see how the many restrictions placed upon women came directly from Muhammad himself. Again, this put me in a position of wondering whether the true God of heaven …
Hypocrisy of the Heart
“Such artists strained after emotions not that they felt, but that they felt they ought to feel. This, of course, is one of the sources of sentimentality; it is the tribute that vanity pays to compassion” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 119).