On the Weekly Standard blog, Lee Smith notes that this week’s riot in Cairo “was preceded by a smaller demonstration last week when Copts protested an attack on a church in Edfu, almost 500 miles south of the Egyptian capital, and demanded that the Muslim gangs responsible for the destruction of the church be brought to justice. The army and security forces beat Copt protesters when they marched last week, too.” A video of the beating in Edfu is on... Read more
On the Huffington Post , Christian Sahner provides some background for the current hostility against Christians in the Middle East. He notes, for instance that “Western nations have long showered attention upon Arab Christian communities.” As a result of their role in diplomatic relations between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, for instance, , Christians gained a “privileged relationship gave Christians unprecedented access to education, wealth, and influence.” Anti-Christian animus is thus of a piece with anti-Westernism. Domestically, too, Christians have... Read more
Americans, Hauerwas says, “presume that they have exercised their freedom when the get to choose between a Sony or Pansonic television.” That’s a cleverly subversive thing to say, but things are not quite as easy as Hauerwas makes them. Consumers may, for all I know, often be this superficial: “I get to choose Sony or Panasonic! What a country!” Though the consumer choosing his Sony may never think of it, the fact that there is both a Sony and a... Read more
Stanley Hauerwas ( War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity ) offers a neat definition for American freedom: It is the modern “attempt to produce a people who believe that they should have no story except the story that they chose when they had no story.” Hauerwas’s test question is, “Do you think you ought to be held accountable for decisions you made when you did not know what you were doing?” By and large,... Read more
In her 1999 book, The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control , Jacqueline Kasun quoted a statement made by USAID Office of Population director Reimert Ravenholt in a 1977 St. Louis Post-Dispatch interview. Ravenholt said that we should aim for sterilization of 25% of the world’s fertile women. Without severe population control measures, it would become impossible to maintain “the normal operation of U.S. commercial interests around the world.” Kasun explains, “Dr. Ravenholt was reported... Read more
In September of this year, Nick Turse reported on Salon.com that the Obama administration has greatly increased the US military presence in the 97 or so countries that make up what the Bush administration called the “ark of instability.” To be specific: “The United States is now involved in wars in six arc-of-instability nations: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. It has military personnel deployed in other arc states, including Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco,... Read more
On September 11 this year, Walter Russell Mead reported on the plight of Christians on his blog at the National Interest web site. Mead bemoand the fact that one of the consequences of the US invasion of Iraq has been the rapid decline of non-Muslim residents: “Comprising at least 5% of Iraq’s population before the 2003 invasion, well over half of these Christians and others have fled their ancestral homes. As the country has stabilized in the past few years,... Read more
In today’s Jerusalem Post , Caroline Glick ponders the strange disinteret in the rapid expulsion of Christians from the Middle East. She notes, “at the time of Lebanese independence from France in 1946 the majority of Lebanese were Christians. Today less than 30% of Lebanese are Christians. In Turkey, the Christian population has dwindled from 2 million at the end of World War I to less than 100,000 today. In Syria, at the time of independence Christians made up nearly... Read more
INTRODUCTION From the opening chapters of Genesis, the Bible tells the story of two peoples, two cities, which are characterized by radically different desires and aims. They are the dead who never rise (Isaiah 26:14) and the dead-and-risen, who will be reborn from the earth (26:19). THE TEXT “The way of the just is uprightness; O Most Upright, You weigh the path of the just. Yes, in the way of Your judgments, O Lord, we have waited for You; the... Read more
It’s a couple of days old, but you can find my reflections on this cutting-edge scientific question at http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/10/does-the-sun-rise/peter-j-leithart . And don’t miss the fun discussion that ensued in the comments. Read more
Leithart
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