Culture
In the end, reality always wins. An old saying has it that: God always forgives; man sometimes; Nature never.
In Krakow with the Polish bishops two weeks ago, Pope Francis declared that, “We are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of man as the image of God.” He specifically included within this defacement “[the ideology of] ‘gende...
Analysis
A brief history of Islam in Turkey, and what it means for the rise of ISIS.
A Dutchman of 6-foot-5 stature looked
at me with a tilted head at an academic conference. “My grandmother used to
tell me if I didn’t behave she would give me to Turks…you don’t look that
menacing.” I looked up at the man, who was a foot taller than me, and thanked him
for the compliment, and we continued our discussion about Turkey’s ac...
Editorial
Why should we equate Christianity to Islam in terms of its inner dynamic—that is, its core beliefs about God, man, the temporal order, and so forth? Why must we think that Islam and Christianity are equal in terms of moral teachings?
This past week I spent several days with some Fundamentalists.
Not only did I converse at length with these strange creatures, I ate
meals with them and slept in the same house. They fed me well; they
never threatened me; I never heard any of them refer other people as
"infidels" or
Ecclesia et Civitas
People recognize on some level that the current situation is bizarre, and that an accepted system of identities rather like the inherited one is basic to human life.
Brexit and the Trump movement, with their emphasis on the decisive importance of national identity, show that explicit identity politics has spread to all points of the political compass.
That's not surprising, since identity is radically contested today. The questions relate not only to who gets placed where, or the common concerns of this group or that, ...
Clark on China
Pope Francis is not the first pope to turn his pastoral gaze toward China, and in the long scope of the Middle Kingdom's history, the Vatican’s overtures to China are not so unusual.
The
American historian and novelist Edward Eggleston once said,
“Journalism is organized gossip.” There has been a lot of
journalism lately about the Church in China, but it has been
extremely difficult to separate the genuine news from “organized
gossip.” In June, the bishop of Shanghai, Ma Daqin, who has spent
four years under house arrest for refusing to join...
