I just returned from a two-day retreat with some middle school boys at Circle Lake Retreat Center just north of Houston. As I was walking through the retreat center grounds with the boys after my talk on responsibility, one of them commented on how the landscape and climate is very much like that in Mexico. The boy, Jorge, is from Mexico City and has been in the United States for about two years. 75% of the 8th grade boys at... Read more
Ninety-two years ago, a group of fervent Turkish nationalists tried to wipe out the Armenian Christian community. The estimated death toll ranges from 500,000 to 1.5 million. After the Holocaust, it is the most widely recognized incident of genocide. This was not motivated by religion: it was carried out the the avid nationalists who went on to found the modern Turkish state on the grounds that the Armenians were collaborating with the Russians. No, it was secular nationalism that killed... Read more
I have a post up over at RedState re: last night’s Republican debate that may be of interest to some of Vox Nova’s readers. In a nutshell, I think Rudy won, but I was also impressed with Fred Thompson’s performance. You may wish to comment here though, as the RedState crowd is a bit riled up over my statement that I will not support Rudy under any circumstances. Read more
With respect to society, the democratic tradition with all its values is theoretically oriented to a universal horizon. Its values of liberty, equality, and fraternity are realized on this planet only rarely, poorly, and hypocritically; in any case they are not mainly about the poor, although civil rights have generally spread beyond the bourgeois world as if a reservoir had overflowed. The citizen is at the center of democratic values. In practice and in historical reality, especially in the current... Read more
While flying back today from lovely Harrisburg, PA (the whole town smells like chocolate!), flipping through The Atlantic, I came across two books that looked really interesting. First, there’s Eamon Duffy’s new work, “Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240-1570.” Duffy apparently extracts great riches from the marginalia in the prayer books of pre-suppression England. In fact, he works with the actual copy of the prayer book that St. Thomas More used, and wrote in, while awaiting his... Read more
Eric Reeves takes aim at President Carter’s shameful statement that genocide has not taken place in Darfur. Here’s a taste: Carter got one thing right–that there is a legal definition of genocide, embodied in the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide–but that’s it. The “atrocities” Carter refers to have included, over the past four and a half years, the deliberate, ethnically targeted destruction of not only African tribal populations, but their villages, homes, food-... Read more
One recognizable but little discussed aspect of rights in developed nations is the denial of the same Enlightenment tools of analysis enjoyed by those who see themselves as protectors of the oppressed to those who criticize not the comfortable complacencies of Western nations but the all too frequent horrors of their prior communities. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a courageous woman originally from Somalia and now always under the constant and legitimate threat of murder as a citizen in the West, is... Read more
The opponents of the S-CHIP program will go to any length to block its expansion. First, they tried to bamboozle everybody by arguing that the program would cover children in households earning up to $83,000. Except this was patently false. The bill stays within the boundaries of current law, limiting funds to families at twice the federal poverty level ($20,650 for a family of four, for a program limit of $41,300). States that want to go higher would need federal... Read more
The Supreme Court refused to hear case from a man who says the CIA kidnapped him and held him in an Afghan prison, during which time he was tortured. The Court’s refusal to hear the case means this man has no recourse for Justice. By the way, he wasn’t the man at the CIA had wanted. Oops! Read more
The Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches (Oct 8 – 14), headed by Cardinal Kasper and Metropolitan John Zizioulas, will be discussing and debating the nature of the Church. While there have been many positive results as a result of these meetings, they have not been free from controversy, as the 1993 Balamand meeting shows us. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this discussion and how it relates to the CDF Document, Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain... Read more
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