I announce to you a great joy:  The Interpreter Foundation has a new website!   You can admire it here.  Please bookmark it for future reference.   I would like to thank all those who worked to make this a reality.  I don’t have all the names and I apologize for that, but I do want to mention Allen Wyatt, Alan Sikes, and Ryan Knowlton and to acknowledge all of the excellent work that they’ve put into this.... Read more

    Brian Thompson has asked my opinion of a Prager University video done by Ayaan Hirsi Ali:   “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?”   It’s an interesting video, about 5:10 minutes long, and I recommend it for your viewing.  (More than thirteen million people have already watched it.)   Here’s my brief response:   I see little in it with which I disagree.   I concur, for  example, that Islam should not be called a “religion of peace.”... Read more

    Once again, a few notes from an eventually forthcoming book:   The vast majority of the Arabs on the eve of the rise of Islam were pagans. But this statement, true though it is, requires some careful explanation. Not all Arabs were pagans. There were Christians and Jews in some parts of the peninsula who had considerable influence. Furthermore, the paganism of the majority was clearly an apostate remnant of earlier revelations. For example, the pre-Islamic Arabs knew... Read more

    Yesterday, in an entry titled “Radicalism defined,” I cited the late Russell Kirk’s definition of radicalism.  Here are his “six canons of conservative thought,” from his classic 1953 book The Conservative Mind:   (1)  Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead.  Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.  A narrow rationality, what Coleridge calls the Understanding,... Read more

    You may be aware of the recent minor flap over a garbled quotation from a review (“Should We Apologize for Apologetics?”) recently published by Steve Densley in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture.  I’ve posted about it — in chronological order — here, here, and here.  (I understand that I’ve made it a huge issue and I’m informed that I’m very, very upset about it.  You’ll probably be able to detect that from the hysterical and enraged tenor of... Read more

    Probably the first serious conservative writer that I ever read, apart from William F. Buckley Jr., was Russell Kirk (1918-1994).   Here, from his classic book The Conservative Mind, is his attempt to sum up the essence of what he termed radicalism, which he vigorously rejected.  The basic principles of all Western radicalisms, he said, are:   (1)  The perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism.  Radicals believe that education, positive legislation, and alteration of... Read more

    I’m told that the folks at Greg Kofford Books have now corrected their inaccurate quotation of Steve Densley’s Interpreter review of one of their books.  (I’ve been busy in Jerusalem and have just spent roughly thirty hours in airports and on airplanes during my return home, so I haven’t really been paying a whole lot of attention.)   I mentioned the matter twice here on this blog:   “Constructing advertising copy and jacket blurbs: art or science?”   “‘A very... Read more

    “Repudiation of scientism is the only way the we can break free from some of the more debilitating habits of thought that have dominated modern intellectual life.  But this repudiation is unsustainable, even by the most heroic effort, without a distinction between science and scientism.  If denying scientism’s sway requires us to deny the truthfulness, value, or reality of scientific knowledge — as seems to be implied by some of today’s critiques — then in my opinion the... Read more

    The late anthropologist Loren Eiseley, in The Firmament of Time: A scientist writing around the turn of the century remarked that all of the past generations of men have lived and died in a world of illusions.  The unconscious irony in his observation consists in the fact that this man assumed the progress of science to have been so great that a clear vision of the world without illusion was, by his own time, possible.  It is needless... Read more

    A couple of days ago, I briefly related a story about the rival Arabian poets Jarir and Farazdaq.  (See “Ancient Arabia and the power of words.”)  That is the anecdote mentioned here:   Several observations can be made about this story. First of all, like the story before it, it illustrates the power of the pre-Islamic Arabian poet. But it also says a great deal about primitive Arab notions of where poetry comes from. The image of Jarir... Read more