Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 is intended as a monument to members of his family, and to the 30 million others, who died in Mao’s famine. The famine left horrors in its wake: “Some villages transported corpses by the truckload for burial in common graves. In villages where survivors lacked the strength for proper interment, the limbs of the dead protruded from the ground. In some places, the dead remained along the roadsides where they had dropped... Read more
World War II didn’t end when World War II ended, Keith Lowe shows in his numbing Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II . Instead of concentrating on the European miracle of recovery, he focuses on “the period before such attempts at rehabilitation were even a possibility, when most of Europe was still extremely volatile, and violence could flare up once again at the slightest provocation.” (xvii). It was chaotic indeed: “in some parts of Europe, ethnic... Read more
Ma Jian reports in the NYT today about the inequities and brutalities of China’s self-imposed genocide. Wealthy Chinese circumvent the one-child policy with comparative ease. Not so the poor in the many villages of China: “Village family-planning officers vigilantly chart the menstrual cycle and pelvic-exam results of every woman of childbearing age in their area. If a woman gets pregnant without permission and is unable to pay the often exorbitant fine for violating the policy, she risks being subjected to... Read more
Reviewing two new books about the internet at TLS , Michael Saler sketches the religious ideology of Silicon Valley: “The ‘Valley’ is not merely a byword for technological innovation and economic growth: it is the lush seedbed for a new ideology of the twenty-first century, one that fills the void left by the Cold War. This ideology revolves around the internet. Its fundamentalist narrative has been spun over several decades from such diverse strands as free-market economics, techno-mysticism, anarchist leanings... Read more
Registration for the very first Trinity House intensive class is now open. The course on How to Read the Bible will be taught by James Jordan and Peter Leithart at Trinity Presbyterian Church , Birmingham, Alabama, August 26-30. Registration ends on July 1. You can find more information about Trinity House classes here . You can also now donate to Trinity House from the web site, using the form here . Read more
I have my world, but before I or my world existed there was the world. This distinction between my world and not-mine is, O’Donovan says ( Self, World, and Time: Volume 1: Ethics as Theology: An Induction ), what we mean by “the world’s objective truth ” (10). The truth of the world that is not-mine imposes demands on me: “moral awareness is the demand that the world lays on my inner self without being my inner self.” Given this... Read more
In the newly published first volume of his Ethics as Theology, entitled Self, World, and Time: Volume 1: Ethics as Theology: An Induction , Oliver O’Donovan suggests that the moral life is not something we choose to enter but something we wake to: “Let us say, we awake to our moral experience in the beginning. What seems like the beginning is not really a beginning at all. We wake to find things going on, and ourselves going on in the... Read more
There are stones, and then there are stones, says Tyconius ( The Book of Rules ). In Ezekiel, the king of Tyre is surrounded by precious stones, but “these words pertain both to the devil and to man. For these twelves tones as well as gold and silver and all treasures, a assigned to the devil, adhere to him.” But then there are also twelve foundations stones in the new Jerusalem. Tyconius is no Manichean: “All things that God made... Read more
In the The Book of Rules , Tyconius suggests that in his witness to Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel represents “the whole body of the church” since “Daniel confounded the king of Babylon as a figure.” Through the Spirit, Daniel “brought the proud king to his knees to confess the one God by virtue of the church’s majesty; by the confession of his own power and his own heavenly wisdom, he overturned the superstitions of Babylon.” For Tyconius, this means that Nebuchadnezzar was... Read more
In his Redeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal Virtues (Radical Traditions) , Bruce Ward examines the paradoxes of the peculiarly modern virtue of tolerance (113-7). If tolerance is understood as forbearance toward what is morally repugnant, it is not morally indifferent or neutral but is morally founded. Endurance of the intolerable can be a virtue, but it’s a question whether it’s a virtue that can fly in our age of moral relativism. Tolerance in this sense is subverted not... Read more
Leithart
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