Take Five: Jerry Springer and Moral Responsibility
Should TV jerks or pranksters be held responsible when they drive someone to suicide?
Yearly Archive: 2019
Capitalist Globalism
“Citizen of the world,” as I have explained, was a phrase picked up from the Stoics and adopted by intellectuals like Voltaire and Adam Smith. The coupling of Adam Smith with Voltaire is bound to annoy “conservative” defenders of capitalist ideology, but a few words on his globalist tendencies may help to explain why Republicans were so quick to condemn any attempt to defend the American people from predatory multi-national corporations. Smith is frequently invoked as the godfather of the free-trade globalism advocated by both American political parties today, and although this is hardly fair to a man who wrote...
Trump-Putin Summit on Elbe Day 2020?
I don’t know if any Trump administration people read Fleming.Foundation. But if so, a great idea would be for the president to hold three summits with Putin in the next year: first in Washington, then in Moscow, then the culmination on the Elbe River on April 25, 2020, to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Elbe Day. That’s when American and Soviet/Russian forces met on the Elbe River. It was five days before Hitler blew his Nazi brains out in the Berlin bunker. Here’s the iconic photo: Trump and Putin meeting practically over Shicklgruber’s ashes also would taunt those who continue...
Back on the Road from Damascus: Finding Our Bearings
Greetings once again, fellow travelers. It is my distinct pleasure to be in your company once more. Your humble guide to the history of the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches has been long absent: I’ve been finishing a dissertation, defending it, and submitting it. Now that I’ve left behind me the unenviable existence of a graduate student in the 21st century, I return to you so that we may continue on our way through the sad history of division in the Body of Christ. But before we break a new path, we ought to pause and get our...
Religion in Public Life
More religion in public life? Depends on the religion, depends on the kind of government.
The Enlightenment Against Nations and Peoples
When a French intellectual looked in the mirror in 1600, he saw a Frenchman and a Christian where he would have liked to have seen a Greek pagan. Since the Church was still powerful, few intellectuals were as mad as Giordano Bruno, who was justly burned at the stake in 1600, for his neopagan notions. Instead, the intellectuals became sly and ironic. From Montaigne on, intellectuals began subjecting Catholic France to imaginary visitors from Latin America, Persia, and China, all of whom expressed astonishment at the silly religion, false reverence to the king, and loyalty to the great nation.
Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Monaco
I shall leave the circumstances of my breaking the Orthodox Easter fast shrouded, like a bottle of champagne in a pretentious restaurant, in a starched napkin. Instead, the present post takes up the theme of nostalgia where I left it last week, somewhere among the trees of life.
Poems: Vachel Lindsay
And must the Senator from Illinois
Be this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?
This brazen gutter idol, reared to power
Upon a leering pyramid of lies?
Joe Biden’s Hoax Campaign
Biden has a dilemma. He has to win the Democratic primaries, which means winning the “intersectional” struggle. But then in the general election Working Class Joe, as he likes to be called even though now he’s wealthy, has to win back all those working-class Democrats he grew up with in Scranton, Pa. until he was 10, then in Delaware, before being absorbed into the Establishment.
An Old Clip from PBS: Thomas Fleming
Pastor David Ramirez posted this bit of an interview done a long time ago with Thomas Fleming for the series “Making Sense of the Sixties.” I am not sure who this black-haired young man is, but his point of view seems familiar.
