Religion in Public Life
More religion in public life? Depends on the religion, depends on the kind of government.
More religion in public life? Depends on the religion, depends on the kind of government.
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.
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?
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.
At this point in the argument, I want to make it plain that I am not trying to write even a brief history of political universalism. My basic intent is to show some of the more important influences—influences, I wish to emphasize, that I do not necessarily criticize much less condemn. So far, I have briefly mentioned the Stoic ideal of world-citizenship, which was transformed into a more restrained celebration of the Imperium Romanum as an ideal of human community rooted in justice. The disintegration of the Empire, rather than discrediting the imperial ideal, invested it with spiritual significance. I...
Poor Robert de Niro is still the pale-faced teenage punk Bobby Milk, too dumb and too lazy to finish high school or find a job anywhere but in the make-believe world of Hollwyood movies.
France’s anti-Christian ruling class lament the fire that damaged a valuable symbol of their government’s subjugation of Christianity
Conservatives are upset that Middlebury College has cancelled a conservative speaker, allegedly out of concern for safety. The safety angle shows how utterly degradingly stupid college officials have become. Of course, any rational person despises Middlebury for this and a thousand other crimes. But, let us take a breath and reflect.
If family ties and local patriotism mean little, then the Stoic should regard all men as his fellow-citizens. He should be a cosmopolites—a citizen of the world. Like most of the harsher teachings of the Stoics, cosmopolitanism is easier to mouth than to practice. So austere a Stoic as Cato the younger was able to hand off his wife to a friend, but he could not cease to be a Roman patriot who preferred death to living under a dictator who, among other sins, cultivated the friendship of foreigners.
I see Prof. Sir Roger Scruton has been sacked by the Conservative government for saying George Soros is bad, Islamophobia is an imaginary problem, the sky is blue, water freezes at O centigrade, and a host of other offense notions. I never met Scruton, though I used to have some dealings with the Salisbury Review. I read some of his essays and his book on Sexual Desire, which had some good things in it but comes out of a philosophical tradition that has done far more harm than good. In this sense he is a real conservative, clinging to rationalism...