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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
Doug Bandow wrote the following for the American Spectator Online back in January:
“Dina Guirguis of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy testified last week before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: ‘Egypt’s native Christians . . . .are the Middle East’s largest Christian minority but in the past decade have faced an alarming escalation of violence as state protection has dwindled.’ Yet when the Copts attempt to protect themselves, as in the city of Giza last November, the police do intervene — against the victims.
“Guirguis pointed to one case where a judge and his two sons, who were prosecutors, led a mob in destroying a Greek Orthodox church. ‘At least half a dozen murders of Christians by Muslims in the last four years were rendered crimes without punishment due to the refusal of the state to follow the requirements of the rule of law in prosecuting felonies,’ she added. The complicity of security forces and legal officials in violence as well as discrimination demonstrates to all Egyptians that ‘sectarian violence is a crime to be committed with impunity,’ Guirguis warned.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, February 12, 2011 at 8:34 am
In USA Today, Jody Bottum reminds us of the suffering of Egyptian Christians: “About 10% of the Egyptian population (and declining, down more than half over the past century ), these people have suffered discrimination under 30 years of rule by the now-embattled president, Hosni Mubarak. And they’ve seen that discrimination ratcheted up into open persecution during the current unrest, which began with a car bomb in Alexandria killing 21 at a Coptic church on Jan. 1 and continued through the massacre of 11 Christians in the village of Sharona on Jan. 30.”
He adds that the US’s and Europe’s attention to persecution of Christians has been declining steadily for some time: “For a decade now, Western nations have done little to help. Up to 1.4 million of Iraq’s Christians have fled since the war began in 2003, and without some kind of aid, there will be no native Christian population—none, not a single practicing Christian community—left in the Islamic countries of the Middle East by 2050.”
International pressure can alleviate Christian suffering in Muslim countries, as recent developments in Sudan indicate: “The voting in Sudan last month overwhelmingly favored secession by the oppressed populations in the oil-rich south. Assuming all goes as planned, the Christian-majority nation of Southern Sudan will be created this July. . . . The 2011 independence of Southern Sudan is a fruit of that effort—proof that, though it might take decades, international pressure can succeed.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, February 7, 2011 at 9:47 am
We must support our ally Egypt, the cry goes up. ”I stand ready to assist President Obama in the pursuit of a policy that defends our invaluable ally; and advances Egyptians’ inalienable, peaceful aspirations,” says an email message from Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan.
And I’m reminded of reports on Voice of the Martyrs, like this one from November 2010: “Egyptian Christians fear for their safety as false allegations, violent threats and mass demonstrations pile up against the Church in Egypt. Muslim anger was ignited last month when entirely unfounded accusations were made on Al-Jazeera TV that Egyptian Christians were aligned with Israel and stockpiling weapons in preparation for waging war against Muslims. (Egypt borders Israel as well as the Gaza Strip.) Tensions were also fueled by Islamist leaders falsely accusing Christians of kidnapping and torturing women who had converted to Islam. Egyptian Christians’ rights were subsequently threatened by the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, a government body, which confirmed Egypt to be an Islamic state where ‘the citizenship rights of non-Muslims were conditional to their abiding by the Islamic identity of the State.’ Thousands of Muslims with the Front of Islamic Egypt have promised Christians a ‘bloodbath’ in at least 10 mass demonstrations.”
Under pressure from the US, Mubarak has helped the Copts, but injustices large and small remain entrenched in Egypt. Do we want or need such an “invaluable ally”?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, January 28, 2011 at 4:37 pm
David Brooks’s NYT editorial today puts Gen. McChrystal’s removal in cultural context. Everyone in DC and in the military kvetches, Brooks says; it’s part of the culture, part of the way political groups maintain their cohesion over against everyone else. It has always been so. What has changed in the last few decades, though, is the development of a media ethic of exposure that replaced the ethic of reticence sometime after Vietnam.
Brooks concludes: “The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.
“Another scalp is on the wall. Government officials will erect even higher walls between themselves and the outside world. The honest and freewheeling will continue to flee public life, and the cautious and calculating will remain.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, June 25, 2010 at 2:10 pm
An article in the January 28, 2010 issue of the New York Times cites a study that indicates that, contrary to the defenses offered for a change in law, gay marriage does not nudge homosexuals toward monogamy:
“A study to be released next month is offering a rare glimpse inside gay relationships and reveals that monogamy is not a central feature for many. Some gay men and lesbians argue that, as a result, they have stronger, longer-lasting and more honest relationships. And while that may sound counterintuitive, some experts say boundary-challenging gay relationships represent an evolution in marriage — one that might point the way for the survival of the institution.
“New research at San Francisco State University reveals just how common open relationships are among gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. The Gay Couples Study has followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 7:09 am
The announcement of Obama’s Peace Prize was greeted with gasps, but on reflection it makes sense. Obama is, after all, our first Scandinavian President.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, October 9, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Cambridge physicist David JC Mackay (Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, online at www.withouthotair.com) offers a sobering analysis of the practicality of wind power as an alternative energy source for the UK: “Let’s compare this estimate of British wind potential with current installed wind power worldwide. The windmills that would be required to provide the UK with 20 kWh/d per person amount to 50 times the entire wind hardware of Denmark; 7 times all the wind farms of Germany; and double the entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world.
“Please don’t misunderstand me. Am I saying that we shouldn’t bother building wind farms? Not at all. I’m simply trying to convey a helpful fact, namely that if we want wind power to truly make a difference, the wind farms must cover a very large area.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 9:49 am
Ross Douthat writes, “If the Western leadership class survives the current crisis, after all, the lesson they’re going to draw from it is relatively simple: We must never let this happen again. And while that impulse could be a spur to greater decentralization and democratization, it’s more likely to be produce greater supranational regulation, more expansive bureaucracy, and a more hand-in-glove relationship between big government and big business than existed before the crisis. In theory, one way to respond to a ‘populist whirlwind’ would be to make governments more accountable to the voting public. But in practice, I suspect, the more likely response will be to build stronger dikes and firewalls against the dangerous and unpredictable masses, producing post-crisis institutions that are even more insulated from democratic accountability than they were before.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Jim Rogers of Texas A&M responds to Charles Krauthammer’s argument that the Congressional response to the AIG bonuses are unconstitutional (posted here last weekend):
“I agree that Congress’s action w.r.t. the AIG bonuses is bad policy. I’m always baffled by the need to read unconstitutionality into bad policies. Stupid laws are not necessarily unconstitutional.
“In any event, Krauthammer is flat-out wrong as to the illegality and the unconstitutionality of what Congress is attempting to do.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 23, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Charles Krauthammer has a sharp analysis of the AIG bonus fiasco: “in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone. If Bill Gates were to pay these AIG bonuses every year for the next 100 years, he’d still be left with more than half his personal fortune.”
He argues that the Congressional effort to confiscate the bonuses away is illegal and unconstitutional: “And there is such a thing as law. The way to break a contract legally is Chapter 11. Short of that, a contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress will summarily cancel contracts?
“Even worse are the clever schemes being cooked up in Congress to retrieve the money by means of some retroactive confiscatory tax. The common law is pretty clear about the impermissibility of ex post facto legislation and bills of attainder. They also happen to be specifically prohibited by the Constitution. We’re going to overturn that for $165 million?”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, March 21, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Camille Paglia can be depended upon for thinking for herself. In an essay at Salon.com, she calls for Obama to be freed from the “flacks, fixers and goons — his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship.”
She also puts in a vigorous defense of Rush Limbaugh’s right to offend and right to earn a good living doing it: “This entire fracas was set off by the president himself, who lowered his office by targeting a private citizen by name. Limbaugh had every right to counterattack, which he did with gusto. Why have so many Democrats abandoned the hallowed principle of free speech?”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 4:12 am
Summarizing the lessons drawn from Steve Coll’s recent The Bin Ladens, Fred Halliday writes (in NYRB), “although the attacks on Manhattan and Washington in September 2001 were direct hits on American soil, Osama bin Laden’s aims do not encompass the defeat of the United States, or the conquest of the West, by, or ‘for,’ Islam: the attacks on Europe and the US are, in Arabian tribal terminology, ‘raids.’ The ‘planes operation,’ as it was originally called when it was first conceived in 1998, was designed to be a spectacular piece of theater, what anarchists used to call ‘Propaganda of the Deed,’ a provocation that would draw the US military into further, and costly, conflicts in the Middle East, primarily Afghanistan. This was also the original purpose of the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor in October 2000, an operation that failed to sink the missile-carrying vessel, but that did kill seventeen American servicemen.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, February 28, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton disappointed human rights activists by degrading the role of human rights issues in her discussions with Chinese. Differences on human rights will not, she said, interfere with the common interests of the US and China.
Today, she commends the Chinese for bailing out the US by continuing to buy Treasury bonds.
Make that: Differences on human rights will not keep the US from desperately asking the Chinese to prop up the US economy.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 7:37 am
In a largely negative review of John and Carol Garrard’s Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent (TNR, December 31), Leon Aron notes the importance of Orthodoxy in contemporary Russian politics: “Orthodoxy is now all the rage among the Russian elite. The formerly godless KGB and Komsomol graduates who rule the country and own much of it are suddenly gripped by religious fervor. Vladimir Putin kept a small private chapel next to his Kremlin office . . . , and undeoubtedly he now has another one in the government’s ‘White House’ building on Novy Arbat. In a series of widely published photos from Putin’s summer vacation in 2007, an Orthodox cross was featured prominently between the president’s bare and mighty pectorals, a rifle with a telescope sight firmly in his strong hands and a hunting knife dangling from his belt. . . .
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, January 17, 2009 at 12:35 pm
One of the delicious results of McCain’s Palin pick is that it exposes Obama as just another politician, willing to get down and dirty with the rest of them. No more Obama the transcendent, Obama the supra-partisan, Obama the inventor of a new politics. Of course, nothing wrong with being another politician; that’s what politicians are. But Obama had staked his future on his elevation above politics. With Palin threatening his lead, he no longer has that luxury.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 10, 2008 at 3:02 am
Gerard Baker says in the London Times: “It never ceases to amaze me how the Left falls again and again into the old trap of underestimating politicians whom they don’t understand. From Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to George Bush and Mrs Palin, they do it every time. Because these characters talk a bit funny and have ridiculously antiquated views about faith, family and nation, because they haven’t spent time bending the knee to the intellectual metropolitan elites, they can’t be taken seriously.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 10:44 am
Noemie Emery gives a 14-point analysis of what Palin does for McCain over on the Weekly Standard web site. Number 14 is: “Counter-intuitively, makes the issue of Obama’s light resume more potent than ever. Her lack of experience is no more than his is. And he’s–to use a term from Alaska, and the Iditarod–their lead dog.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, August 29, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Drudge couldn’t care a whit for Hillary Clinton, but his increasingly provocative headlines (most recently, “Diss-Off”) for a story on how Obama never considered Hillary as a veep candidate can have only one result: To get Hillary’s supporters, already cool toward Obama, hopping mad.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, August 22, 2008 at 10:44 am
Reader Chris Jones rebuked me, rightly, for putting up Dana Milbank’s version of an Obama quote and accusing him of a Messiah complex. Here’s a fuller version of the quotation, which makes it clear that Obama was actually saying the enthusiasm was about America’s importance and not his own:
“It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Dana Milbank reports that Obama told a House delegation yesterday: “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”
Yes, indeed, a return to American tradition, particularly the American tradition identified by Daniel Walker Howe in his Pulitzer-winning What Hath God Wrought, that is the tradition of modeling political campaigns on camp meeting revivals.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 9:29 am
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