Some things must be done in private

A story from Canada.

Anthropological crisis

Mike Winters on religious freedom and the culture.

Liberating

No education is possible without authority.

Unexpected

On the many faces of Israeli Christianity.

Totalitarianism

Archbishop Gomez on freedom of religion.

Children of the Enlightenment

Civilization is not natural, it is mostly a matter of education.

Pure negativism

Maggie Gallagher makes a good point: contemporary culture seems frozen in time, for the simple reason that it built on the ideal of escaping from an imaginary past, and so it is intrinsically unable to generate any new ideals that could propel it into the future.

The chancellor knows better

Defending parental rights in NYC.

Culture matters

Roger Scruton attack the "Marxian option:" that ultimately everything is shaped by economic factors.

From Saint Simon to Pinker

One of the great religious myth of positivism is that science will lead to universal peace.

Killing machine

Alvaro Vargas Llosa wonders how anybody could like Che Guevara. The short anwer is that Marxism, by failing as a political system, has left a gaping void as a religion (i.e. faith in the revolution, in the advent of a new earthly paradise).

Reality does play a role

Peggy Noonan makes a good comment:

The interview reflects the weird inability of so many in political leadership now to acknowledge the role in life of . . . reality.

However, she fails to recognize that politicians only reflect the culture. Anybody educated at Columbia and Harvard has been taught in countless ways that "we make up our own narrative" is the true definition of freedom. It's just Nietzscheanism for sensitive souls.

Cultureless

The Pope's speech at the German parliament should not be missed. Notice the deep connection between positivism (the reduction of reason to the analysis of empirical facts) and the deep identity crisis of Western culture.

GKC rules

An unusual occurrence: the Chronicle of Higher Education on Chesterton.

Matthew effect

Language is learnt in the encounter with reality.