Director: Peter Berg
I've often been enamored by good writers that are also good teachers. The best of these draw your interest to the subject by their knowledge, passion, and insight. One of these is Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University, who wrote the wonderful Lewis Agonistes: How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us To Wrestle With The Modern and Postmodern World. In that book he shows us a Lewis at home in the halls of reason as well as the ether of the numinous. The Teaching Company has also released two courses by him that I recommend to anyone interested in C.S. Lewis and literature: The Life and Writings of C.S. Lewis and Plato to Postmodernism.
In Time magazine's newsstand issue they have listed their top one hundred influential people and on the list of leaders and revolutionaries is the Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola.
I found out recently that the current Evangelical Theological Society president Frank Beckwith has converted to Catholicism. It first hit the blogosphere and then Dr. Beckwith wrote about his road back to Rome, followed today with a short note on Right Reason announcing his resignation as member and president of ETS. I greatly respect Peter Kreeft and Richard John Neuhaus and have read their conversion stories (Kreeft from Calvinist Protestantism and Neuhaus was a Lutheran pastor) and I'll be interested to hear Beckwith's story in more detail. As Doug Groothius wrote in the comments on RR I believe that Frank has embraced serious theological error and this will be a story that circulates in the arena of Christian scholarship for some time."Looking at tradition would also help evangelicals learn about Christian liturgical traditions, like Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, that many evangelicals reject because they say liturgy is unbiblical. When did these practices come to be? It turns out many of them came to be very early on in church history when people were close historically to the apostles themselves. There must be something to these practices that the early Christians thought was perfectly consistent with what they had received from the apostles."Update 3: The man who was Vice President when Dr. Beckwith stepped down and became President of ETS, Bruce Ware, was a guest on Al Mohler's radio show. Podcast here.
when we counterattack al Qaeda's pseudo-Islamic scam of so-called "Jihadi Martyrdom" in Western secular words only -- criminals, thugs, killers, bring to justice, etc. -- we are simply shooting with blanks. Worse yet, when we parrot the Terrorists' own words of self-sanctification, we even shoot ourselves by the perverse effects of "semantic infiltration," which the late great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan defined thirty years in a Cold War context as follows:He proposes that we instead use an alternative lexicon: replace jihadis and mujahideen with irhabis (terrorists) and mufsiduun (evildoers, mortal sinners, corrupters), instead. No more Jihad (Holy War) but ungodly Hirabah (unholy war, war against society) and forbidden Irhab (Terrorism). Same goes for the Godly heroes of Jihadi martyrdom they falsely claim to be but as the Satanic perpetrators of Irhabi murderdom (terroristic genocide). Not destined for a virgin-filled Paradise for killing all of us so-called kuffar (infidels) but to a demon-filled Jahannam (Eternal Hellfire) for killing so many thousands of innocents, fellow Muslims, "People of the Book" and "Sons of Abraham." And finally, take away the abd'al-Allah (Servants of Allah) they falsely claim to be and insert the abd'al-Shaitan (Servants of Satan), the murtadduun (apostates) and the khawarij (outside-the-religion deviants) they really are.
"Semantic infiltration is the process whereby we come to adopt the language of our adversaries in describing political reality. The most brutal totalitarian regimes in the world call themselves 'liberation movements.' [Just as today's AQ-style Terrorists call themselves 'holy warriors']. It is perfectly predictable that they should misuse words to conceal their real nature. But must we aid them in that effort by repeating those words? Worse, do we begin to influence our own perceptions by using them?"
Jon Voight, in an interview with Radar Online, shows that he understands the Jihadi threat we face. Money quote:I feel bad for Nancy Pelosi, AND her neighbors. Anti-war activists from the group Code Pink have been giving her the same treatment the president gets at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. Camping on her San Francisco lawn, they’re demanding she cut off funds to the troops in Iraq.
Besides coolers and mattresses, protesters have brought along a giant paper mache statue of Mahatma Gandhi, who is pretty much the symbol of the anti-war movement. Code Pink was founded on his birthday, and when Saddam Hussein was being given a last chance to open Iraq to U.N. weapons inspectors, posters appeared around America asking “What would Gandhi do?”
And that’s a pretty good question. At what point is it okay to fight dictators like Saddam or the al Qaeda terrorists who want to take his place?
It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER. During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”
The so-called peace movement certainly has the right to make Gandhi’s way their way, but their efforts to make collective suicide American foreign policy just won’t cut it in this country. When American’s think of heroism, we think of the young American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, risking their lives to prevent another Adolph Hitler or Saddam Hussein.
Gandhi probably wouldn't approve, but I can live with that.
I was quite young when I came to the unsurprising conclusion that there was no supreme being who had created the unknown universe and the known world, let alone a supreme being who took an interest in my doings or those of anyone else. I could be asked, I suppose, how I knew this. My first response would be that I learned it from those other humans who were making absurdly large claims that they could never in a billion years have even a slight chance of proving. My second response would be that we now have better explanations than “god” for everything that we do know about, and no sillier explanation than “god” for those numberless things that we cannot know about. Those who claim to “know” the mind of this indefinable entity are therefore wrong by definition and are arrogantly assuming an authority that no human can dare to claim.
In spite of the huge imbalance between the two sides, one resting its claims on reason and evidence and one insisting on “faith,” this ought to be a private dispute between two different mentalities. And I have spent many enjoyable evenings on just this point. The argument about god is the beginning of all intellectual arguments: it is how one works out how to think, which is always much more important than what one thinks. I hope to show in the book that I do understand the pulse that underlies belief.
So this has now become everybody’s business and bids fair to be the dominant subject for the rest of our lives. I thought it was time to re-state the traditional and hard-earned reasonings by which humanity emancipated itself from medieval rule and brought about the triumphs and advances of science and the Enlightenment. I also thought it might be a good moment to show that all the claims of established religion are bogus, and man-made, and undeserving of anything but contempt and ridicule. My hope is that the book will become a part of the long-overdue fight-back against superstition, sexual repression, political fanaticism, and all the other ways in which the “faith-based” have chosen to present themselves.
The film 300 took the box office its opening weekend and is connecting with American audiences. Classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote the introduction to the picture book that accompanies the film. (Just last year Hanson wrote A War Like No Other: How Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War and it has sold surprisingly well.)
see Greg Wolfe, editor of the IMAGE Journal, featured in a section on Christianity in art called Through The Ages. They didn't use many of his comments and while this section was a nice meditation on art history I would have loved to have seen Edward Knippers comment on this, particularly. Knippers's own work is raw, masculine and controversial. His grotesque Salome was inspiration for lyrics to the Vigilantes of Love song Welcome to Struggleville ("Salome she's undressed to the nines, Although a few pounds fatter. She's got Pavlov's bells on her ankles and wrists, She coming at you with her platter.") and his gigantic canvases of of a nude Jesus being whipped (above) or the crowning of thorns (below)
could have been an inspiration for both scenes in the film, and a nice counterbalance to the pristine works of earlier times (and today's Christian bookstore art).Saudi Arabia's actions with respect to Iran have been particularly of interest, as their influence on the price of oil has a direct impact on Iranian cash flow. "The Saudi oil minister has steadfastly refused calls for a special meeting of OPEC and announced that the nation is going to increase its production, which will send the price down even farther," reported NBC News. The belief is the Saudis have fired the first salvo in an oil price war with Iran.
The Saudis have directly warned the Iranians to keep out of "Arabs affairs." We speak with Iranian about Arabs affairs, said Saudi Arabias Foreign Affairs Minister Prince Saud al Faysal. We think that it is dangerous to interfere into our affairs. Therefore, we express to Iranians our concerns about their influence in the Arab world. It is logical. But when other countries speak to them about our problems, that confer legitimacy to the Iranian interferences in the Arab world. This is why we are not favorable. We hope that Iran will be a good neighbor, that the Iranians will be a part of the solution and not the problem. It is what we repeat to them: you do not interfere with our affairs.
The poll exposes a fracture between the attitudes of Muslims aged 16 to 24, most of whom were born in Britain, and those of their parents’ generation, who are more likely to have been immigrants…And now Bernard Lewis has weighed in at the Jerusalem Post that Muslims are "about to take over Europe":
Academic Munira Mirza, lead author of the report, said: “The emergence of a strong Muslim identity in Britain is, in part, a result of multi-cultural policies implemented since the 1980s which have emphasised difference at the expense of shared national identity and divided people along ethnic, religious and cultural lines.”…
While only 17 per cent of over-55s said they would prefer to live under Sharia law, that increased to 37 per cent of those aged 16 to 24…
The poll found that just 19 per cent of Muslims over 55 would prefer to send their children to Islamic state schools. That increased to 37 per cent of those aged 16 to 24.
If a Muslim converts to another religion, 36 per cent of 16-to-24-year-olds thought this should be punished by death, compared with 19 per cent of 55s and over.
The Muslims “seem to be about to take over Europe,” Lewis said at a special briefing with the editorial staff of The Jerusalem Post. Asked what this meant for the continent’s Jews, he responded, “The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim.” Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe’s future would be, “Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?”…It appears Bernard Lewis agrees with recent books by Claire Berlinski and Mark Steyn and Bruce Bawer that Europe has become soft and culturally relativistic.
Instead of fighting the threat, he elaborated, Europeans had given up.
“Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence,” he said. “They have no respect for their own culture.” Europeans had “surrendered” on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of “self-abasement,” “political correctness” and “multi-culturalism,” said Lewis, who was born in London to middle-class Jewish parents but has long lived in the United States…
The Cold War philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using the nuclear weapons they had targeted at each other, would not apply to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran, said Lewis.
“For him, Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement,” said Lewis of Ahmadinejad.
"All Spaniards heard me say on December 29 that I had the conviction that things were better for us than five years ago and that in a year's time things would be even better," Mr Zapatero told a special session of the Spanish parliament.How many people will attempt to bargain with terrorists before they realize it is futile?
"Although it is not frequent among public leaders, I want to recognize the clear mistake I made before all Spanish citizens."
Despite allegations that he had been "fooled" by Eta, he insisted that he had been right to seek negotiations with the terrorist group after they declared a permanent ceasefire last March. "I did what most Spaniards wanted - to try to use the truce to end the violence," he said.
