Stanley Hauerwas Contra the Bad Idea of Religious Toleration

Last updated on: April 30, 2015 at 1:24 pm By Artur Rosman

As Americans we are enjoined to religious tolerance as if it were the 11th commandment. Catholic arguments against changing the definition of marriage sometimes use religious tolerance to argue for retaining distinctively Christian practices of marriage as the law of the land. But is this an effective strategy? If we’re not tolerant, then we’re not playing nice. However, nice is not a theological category. What’s really hiding behind this American commandment? In the video below Hauerwas argues “Tolerance is always a position... Read more

Before Marriage: Gays (As a Group) Were Morally Superior to Christians (As a Group)

Last updated on: June 26, 2015 at 11:40 am By Artur Rosman

Stanley Hauerwas is America’s theological gadfly. Short is the list of people who have not been offended by something said by the Socrates of Durham (North Carolina). There is the infamous example of Hauerwas trying to find the library: Stanley Hauerwas was at Harvard to deliver a lecture and, being there early and still needing to do some preparation, he set out to find the library. Not finding it, he stopped a student and asked him, “Excuse me, where’s the library... Read more

Nietzsche’s Flame of Eternity: It’s Not a Wonderful Philosophy Nor Life

Last updated on: April 28, 2015 at 11:44 am By Artur Rosman

Leszek Kolakowski, author of philosophical barnburners such as Metaphysical Horror and Religion: If There Is No God– : On God, the Devil, Sin, and Other Worries of the So-Called Philosophy of Religion, said the following about the book I would like to start discussing today: There are many books on Nietzsche. Some of them are distinguished by their learning and analytical power, some by their beauty. Very rarely can we find a book that combines both: learning and beauty. We... Read more

Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide

Last updated on: April 25, 2015 at 10:51 am By Artur Rosman

I found something truly unusual while doing research for my piece On the Polish Origins of the Concept of Genocide and Its Armenian Roots. There is a book (of course). What it describes seems as outrageous as anything you might see in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. The thing is, Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide, is not fiction: In 1921, a tightly knit band of killers set out to avenge the deaths of almost one million victims of... Read more

On the Polish Origins of the Concept of Genocide & Its Armenian Roots

Last updated on: April 24, 2015 at 2:02 pm By Artur Rosman

The term genocide seems ancient. It is actually a clumsy Greek-Latin hybrid coined by a Polish Jew between 1943 and 1944 when Polish gentiles were reporting about the Holocaust to Roosevelt who merely shrugged his shoulders. Genocide’s “creator,” Raphael Lemkin used the Armenian Genocide as the baseline for describing the Holocaust. The first published instance of the term is probably his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The history of the Armenian Genocide, so important to Lemkin’s thought, is little known today... Read more

Famous Atheists Who Aren’t Atheist: Hold off on Papism David Brooks!

Last updated on: April 22, 2015 at 5:50 pm By Artur Rosman

Did you know that Sartre was a Jew, Camus intended to become a Protestant, Warhol was a practicing Byzantine, and Hitchcock was a Papist? You can read all about these famous figures in my “Famous Atheists Who Weren’t Atheist” series. Its aim is to out the religious affiliations of famous people erroneously associated in the popular imagination with non-belief or even militant atheism. News trends dictate that this week it’s time to turn to David Brooks. I promise it won’t... Read more

Fr. John Behr: Marriage is a Form of Martyrdom

Last updated on: April 21, 2015 at 12:52 pm By Artur Rosman

After dealing with controversial topics such as the sexual orientation of monasticism, the Catholic background of mainstreaming gay marriage, and the malicious historical ignorance of the head of the FBI I’d like to kick back a bit and do something on Orthodox theology rather than history. This is also a way of checking whether my wife actually reads this blog. If she does, I might be sleeping on the couch. Fr. John Behr is dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary and... Read more

FBI Head Comey is Maliciously Wrong on Holocaust Facts about Poland

Last updated on: April 20, 2015 at 3:03 pm By Artur Rosman

It’s been said the victors write the history books. This should not be equated with the smartest, or most intellectually honest people, writing the history books. There is an penetrating New York Review of Books review of the Benoit Peters tome Derrida: A Biography where we hear the following about American intellectual stupidity, but also, I think, cynicism: But Americans, it’s been said, often got Derrida wrong: deconstruction was never intended as a reproducible methodology, let alone a political weapon. (To... Read more

Sexuality is at the Heart of Christianity’s Place in the World

Last updated on: April 17, 2015 at 2:29 pm By Artur Rosman

We have gone over some of the lineaments of the difference Christian sexual morality makes in the public square. It left its stamp on the sexual orientation of Catholic asceticism; possibly influenced the movement for gay marriage through Andrew Sullivan’s mainstreaming of the notion; and led to the disappearance of ancient homosocial gym culture (until recent times). Kyle Harper’s recent book From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity provides us a convenient outline how much the generation... Read more

Temple of Perfection: Christianity, Homosexuality & America at the Gym

Last updated on: April 16, 2015 at 3:36 pm By Artur Rosman

There is an LA Fitness just down the road from our new apartment. It is an impressive temple to bodily perfection. Yesterday our mattress and boxsprings finally got delivered. It was our first day in something like six months of not sleeping on an undersized mattress directly on the floor or on a couch. Needless to say, we cannot afford the price of admission to the temple of perfection even though it is practically in our backyard. But maybe there’s... Read more