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Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina

2 Responses

  1. Allen Wilson says:

    I’m in full agreement about American Buddhist converts. They don’t have the cultural background needed to understand Buddhism to begin with, so they tend to make it into what they want it to be. Hinduism also suffers from the same cultural translation, and that’s likely the reason some think the Mahabharata describes aircraft and nuclear weapons.

    Is it just me or do these court cases get dumber and sillier every year?

  2. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:

    I feel about Hindoos and Buddhists the way I feel about Greek and Roman pagans. They had a means of grappling with higher reality that was rooted in their culture. In the case of the Greeks, however, their culture is at the root of our culture, and so we can make a stab at understanding them. Eastern religions are simply a playing field on which dumb Americans can exercise their ignorance.

    I did have one amusing exchange with a well-heeled Hindu nationalist group in India that wanted to make an alliance against Islam. One of their leaders made what to him must have seemed a very generous proposal. He would acknowledge Jesus as the greatest of gods, if we would recognize a Hindu deity or two–I think I mentioned Indra or Krishna–as lesser but legitimate deities. Alas,…..