I share here, from my notes, a passage that I liked in Olivier Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam, translated by George Holoch (New York City: Columbia University Press 2007.  It is significant, given his themes, that the book’s original 2005 French title is Laïcité face à l’islam:   Islam’s encounter with the West is as old as Islam itself.  The first Muslim minorities living under Western Christian domination date back to the eleventh century (in Sicily).  Yet the second half... Read more

    One suggestion that has been offered to explain the claim of Christ’s resurrection — this was actually a popular theory among nineteenth-century skeptics and still has advocates today — holds that, although grievously wounded upon the cross, Jesus didn’t actually die.  Instead, he swooned.  People thought he was dead, though, and he was taken and buried.  However, the spices and aromatic oils awakened him after he had been left in the tomb.  So he revived.   Now, this... Read more

    I share here a random potpourri of passages that I marked while reading James Zogby, Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us, and Why It Matters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  Jim Zogby (and his famous pollster brother, John) grew up as first-generation Americans in an Arab Catholic family:   . . . as my mother would say, “lesser men display what they don’t know at the tops of their voices.”  (7)   He tells of the hate... Read more

  There exists an obscure, mostly-ex-LDS-turned-atheist message board where my buffoonish and dishonest but angrily hateful depravity has been chronicled and lamented virtually every day — literally and without exaggeration, virtually every day — for the past fifteen years or so.   For no very good reason, I decided last Friday morning to visit the board and to count the Peterson-related threads on its first page.  (There is one permanent general thread always pinned at the top, and then 49... Read more

    I maintain a blog for many reasons.   One of them is purely personal:  It’s a kind of journal for me, and, even more particularly, it’s a way of remembering things, and especially of remembering people, whose memory I refuse to allow to be wholly lost.   So, for instance, I’m afraid that readers of this blog will have to put up with my regular yearly memorials to my brother and my parents.   Today marks the sixth... Read more

    A confused world desperately craves to know where I stand on the 6-3 decision handed down this morning by the Supreme Court of the United States:   “Supreme Court rules in favor of gay and transgender workers: The justices issued a 6-3 decision Monday stating that federal employment discrimination law covers sexual orientation and gender identity-based offenses.”   And I live to serve.  So here goes:   I’m a conservative, but I’m a conservative who leans libertarian (especially, but... Read more

    Eric Metaxas, Life, God, and Other Small Topics: Conversations from Socrates in the City (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2011) includes the transcript of a 3 December 2008 New York City speech (“The Language of God: A Believer Looks at the Human Genome”) by the physician and geneticist Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D, who was, at the time, between his assignment as leader of the Human Genome Project and his subsequent appointment by President Barack Obama as the director of... Read more

    Eric Metaxas, Life, God, and Other Small Topics: Conversations from Socrates in the City (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2011) includes, among others, a transcript of a 23 January 2003 New York City speech by the philosopher Peter Kreeft, of Boston College.   Suppose you throw God into the package.  What’s God’s answer to the problem of suffering, when he finally appears and gives Job, the archetypal sufferer, his answer?  Job asks all sorts of great questions, and God doesn’t... Read more