Monthly Archive: January 2016

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Christianity and Classical Culture, Episode 2: Immigration

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What is the Christian Tradition regarding immigration? How is that tradition related to the way the ancients saw this issue? What’s a responsible and realistic way to examine this important issue in today’s postmodern soup? Dr. Fleming takes on this timeless issue which is on the minds of many, not just in America, but in Europe as well. Original Air Date: January 12, 2016 Show Run Time: 47 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): Stephen Heiner Transcript available now for Charter Subscribers and a la carte purchase. Christianity and Classical Culture℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation....

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Ransom Notes 2

Dallas Shipp writes in to ask:  “You once wrote that whenever a talking head on television referred to a storm or a shooting as a ‘tragedy,’ their misuse of the word amounted to nihilism. Could you elaborate and explain your point? TJF:  I don’t recall using the word “nihilism,” but I have frequently argued against the trivializing of the word tragedy by applying it to accident victims and people who have suffered in a disaster.  The trivialization works in two directions.  First, it reduces to the word tragedy to meaning something like “terrible misfortune” or “incomprehensible suffering.”   It is...

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Dissolving the German People by Robert Peters

Das Volk hat das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt. Wäre es da nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung löste das Volk auf und wählte ein anderes? The preamble of this piece is the last line from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Die Lösung” (“The Solution”), written by the disillusioned Marxist after the failure of the Workers Uprising on 17 July 1953 and the communist government’s response to that uprising.  The title of the poem suggests an objective correlative with the Nazi term “Die Endlösung” (“The Final Solution”), “The Holocaust” in contemporary parlance.  The term also applies, perhaps more appropriately for this piece, to the...

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Wednesday’s Child: Summing Up and Down

  I begin with house statistics since the day before New Year’s.  We’ve had five guests staying here, all Russian in varying degree, including a Viennese lady by the name of Inga who, even when the lighting is all wrong, looks like a film noir star of the 1940’s.  Suffice it to say that an admirer had given the diva a riding crop for Christmas, which she kindly brandished for us of an evening while wearing, in an effortlessly choreographed sequence, three wigs she had providently packed in her luggage, a blonde, a brunette, and I think a redhead. As...

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Cicero on Duty

In Book III of De Officiis Cicero poses a dilemma: Suppose a father were robbing a temple or digging tunnels into the treasury; should a son give information to the government?  The philosopher’s answer, according to Cicero, was: No, that would be wrong.  Instead,”he ought to defend his father in court. But, someone would ask, doesn’t one’s country take precedence over other responsibilities?  Yes, indeed, but it is in the country’s interest to have citizens loyal to their parents. Obviously, what the philosopher, Hecaton of Rhodes, had in mind was some notion that a healthy state could not exist without...

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Without Apology

This piece is a slightly revised version of a piece I published some 16 years ago in a magazine I was then editing. “States Rights?  You can’t be serious!  What do you want to do–restore Jim Crow or bring back slavery?” Any serious discussion of the American republic always comes aground on this rock, and it does not matter which kind of liberal is expressing the obligatory shock and dismay, whether he is a leftist at the Nation, a neoliberal at the New Republic, or a National Review minicon (or should that be “moneycon”?) looking for ways to pander and slander their way if not...