A reader wrote in yesterday chastising me for claiming that many on the left seem to “hate” Sarah Palin. I’ve given enough examples to believe that I’m on safe ground here, but just in case the reader wasn’t convinced, here’s a piece by a University of Michigan professor (mentioned earlier today by Nathaniel Peters) likening Palin to Muslim fundamentalists in general and Hamas in particular–just in case any overly tolerant readers didn’t automatically conflate Islamic fundamentalism with terrorism.

I’ll stand my ground with my insistence that many on the left hate Sarah Palin in a very real way.

Family, Formation, Faith: These are three pillars of Christian society, three values that must be affirmed and lived by youth today, said Pope Benedict XVI in a recent address to Italian young people. In the process, he critiqued our world for tearing down each of these values through a culture of death, relativism and nihilism, secularism and materialism. But what makes his address here so powerful—reminiscent of his words to American youth in April—is the hopeful realism throughout:

“Dear young people,” cried the Holy Father, “re-appropriate the value of the family, love it not just for the sake of tradition but as a mature and conscious choice.” He also recalled how Vatican Council II had described the family as a “small Church” because “marriage is a Sacrament, in other words a holy and effective sign of the love God gives us in Christ through the Church.”

The second value is “serious intellectual and moral formation”, said Pope Benedict. “The crisis of a society begins,” he said, “when it no longer knows how to transmit its cultural heritage and its fundamental values to the new generations. I am not only referring to the system of education. The question is a broader one. . . . Jesus said: ‘The truth will make you free,’ yet modern nihilism preaches the opposite: that freedom will make you true. There are, indeed, those who maintain that there is no truth, thus opening the way to rendering the concepts of good and evil meaningless, even making them interchangeable.”

The third value identified by the Pope was “sincere and profound faith.” He said: “When a sense of the presence and reality of God is lost, everything becomes ‘flat’ and is reduced to a single dimension. Everything is ‘squashed’ into the material plane. . . . The mystery of existence also disappears: things and people interest me not for themselves but in the degree to which they satisfy my needs. Faith, in this sense, before being a religious belief, is a way of experiencing reality, a way of thinking, an interior sensibility which enriches human beings. . . . Being with Jesus, frequenting Him as a friend in the Gospel and in the Sacraments, you may learn . . . that which society is often no longer capable of giving you: a religious sense.”

“May each of you rediscover God as meaning and foundation for all creatures, light of truth, flame of charity, bond of unity,” he concluded. “You will no longer be afraid to lose your liberty, because you will experience it fully by giving it for love. You will no longer be attached to material goods, because in yourselves you will feel the joy of sharing them. You will no longer be sad at the sadness of the world, but will experience pain for evil and joy for good, especially for mercy and forgiveness. . . . If you really discover God in the face of Christ, you will no longer think of the Church as an institution external to yourselves, but as your spiritual family.”

Grounded on the truth of human fallenness, this is a hopeful realism. But, grounded on the promise of the Gospel, it is a realistic hope.

It seems that people really like talking about novels. My unremarkable comments last Friday have not just generated two derivative posts, but also far more email responses than I was expecting. Now even a blogger from Australia has weighed in . . . and at some length.

Thanks to everyone for the advice and reflections. As promised, I bought Master and Commander yesterday afternoon and am enjoying it thoroughly. It makes me want to flee Manhattan for the Mediterranean, or wherever I can find a cheerful Spanish chambermaid “so very like a dusky peach” (Master and Commander, Ch. 1).

Scientologists in France can’t seem to catch a break:

A French judge has ordered two departments and seven prominent members of the Church of Scientology in France to stand trial on charges of organized fraud, a judicial source said on Monday.

The case is the latest in a series of legal battles that have pitted the French judicial system against the Scientologists, who could be forced to stop their activities in France if found guilty.

I wonder if they would have an easier time being accepted in Europe if they didn’t encourage new members to buy tens of thousands of Euros worth of “purification packs” and books.

On the other hand, France could avoid these silly lawsuits all together if some of its citizens would stop looking for religion in all the wrong places.

In the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier writes an essay he titles “Against Integrity.” It starts with various swipes at Republican hypocrisy, but then moves to this point:

the truth is that Sarah Palin is a woman of integrity. I do not say this sardonically. I find nothing phony in her, nothing cynical. She lacks the detachment from one’s own purposes that phoniness and cynicism (and genuine thought) require. She is too immediately what she is. Palin is the sort of supporter of the war in Iraq whose son is shipping off to the war in Iraq. This I must respect. She is not a Palm conservative, pausing over the creamed spinach to raise another glass to the America in which she chooses not to dwell. Whatever the Christian conservative way of life is, Palin is living it. And so her grotesque and fascinating candidacy broaches an interesting subject, which is the moral insufficiency of integrity.

The blogger Ann Althouse calls the essay ultimate gas-baggery, but Wieseltier is actually in pursuit of an interesting point. He doesn’t manage to catch it—how can we avoid the politics of integrity when the only moral storyline the press knows is hypocrisy? When Wieseltier himself opens with that storyline?

Nonetheless, it’s true that integrity is only a formal characteristic, and we still have to ask what material content fills a person’s integrity. Better a hypocrite than a person with an evil consistency.

At Salon.com, Juan Cole asks what the differences between Christian fundamentalists, like Sarah Palin, and Islamic fundamentalists are? Lipstick is the answer he finds. That she’s not wearing a burka or having her daughter flogged and stoned for adultery might be another.

But those are about the only differences between Pentecostals–at least the ones I know–and radical Muslims that I can find.

If you like philosophy, then boy do I have a blog for you. Alexander Pruss, the unnervingly brilliant Professor at Baylor University, has for some time now been treating the world to his rigorous ruminations.

Pruss is, from one point of view, a philosopher in the style of the eighteenth century: a smart and learned man thinking carefully about all matters of general interest. His two most recent posts perfectly demonstrate this range. Yesterday’s treated of “Telekenesis and the Unreality of Artefacts” while this morning’s offers a “Hypothesis About the Origins of Homophobia.”

But to this generous range he adds total mastery of the severe technical method on which contemporary analytic philosophers pride themselves. It is sometimes slow going, but with patience you should (to paraphrase A.G. Sertillanges) come to savor the bitter and exquisite taste of his careful reasoning.