Tag Archives: history

More than a crisis

Variations on the general theme that things ain’t what they used to be are often heard but rarely taken seriously. And, as a general rule, the older the speaker is, the less seriously the claims are taken. Of course he would say … Continue reading

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Embrace doubt, reject certitude, and move past moral smugness

Noah Millman has a post up at The American Conservative, What Has Christianity To Do With Human Rights? He is responding to a conversation at the heart of which is Ross Douthat, who is making singular claims for the grounding … Continue reading

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Conserving a non-existent past, revering radicalism’s forgotten

Recently I watched this Christian duet’s paean’s ode to Rick Santorum and was struck by the references to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I am aware that Christian conservatives have a “Constitutionalist” focus, and often suggest that the … Continue reading

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Dhimmitude and demise done well

Sometimes readers will ask about a good book on the history of religion, and I’m pretty hard-pressed to recommend something without qualification, caveat, or caution. But I can recommend The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the … Continue reading

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Taking the Western side in religious history

A reader recently asked me about a history of Islam which did not exhibit the strong biases evident in Karen Armstrong’s body of work. I don’t know what to recommend really because I don’t read too many popular works of … Continue reading

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On experts

On the Left right now they’re passing around a paper which suggests that immigration boosts median income. Since the modern American elite Left is pro-immigration they naturally take a shine to such papers, and my own impression from talking to … Continue reading

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Having our way with the past, for it has no honor!

Ross Douthat’s new column, Islam in Two Americas is getting a lot of play. Douthat has to constrain his prose to make it suitable for a print column…I can almost see the excisions of nuance and subtly necessitated by the … Continue reading

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How I learned to love moral relativism & cultural chauvinism

Over at Crunchy Con Rod Dreher points me to a new book, Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, which, in Dreher’s words “attempts to defend St. Paul against his modernist critics (e.g. those … Continue reading

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Christopher Beckwith against modernism

A few months ago I reviewed Empire’s of the Silk. I focused on the historical scholarship, but Lorenzo Warby puts the spotlight on the more normatively charge jeremiad against “modernism” interlaced throughout the book.

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Social cycles

An addendum to my comments on the posts on natalism. As I suggest below I think as a whole it is appropriate to model humans before 1800 as a conventional animal subject to Malthusian constraints. When a new crop (e.g., … Continue reading

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