Christian Human Rights organizations are justly praising British foreign secretary David Miliband for condemning the Iranian Parliament for their draft apostasy bill:

[W]e deplore the way in which the Iranian Parliament is also now discussing a draft penal code that would set out a mandatory death sentence for the “crime,” of apostasy. If adopted, that would violate the right of freedom of religion, which is also an important basis of any civilized society.

Miliband was responding to questions in the House of Commons. Moments before that, however, he responded to this lovely question:

Sir Gerald Kaufman: Would my right hon. Friend, on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, make it clear that an attack on Iran by Israel would trigger off uncontrollable, convulsive and irreversible consequences that would damage not only the region, but the entire global system, and that such an attack must not take place? It would be an attack on one of the nastiest regimes in the world by another of the nastiest regimes in the world.

David Miliband: I do have genuinely huge respect for my right hon. Friend, but I cannot associate myself with that last sentence which he uttered.

Miliband then went on about the importance of diplomacy and economic incentives in dealing with Iran. British reserve, and all that, I suppose. Too bad. Miliband missed an opportunity to swing away at the idiotic moral equivalence assumed by the questioner.

Leave aside, for a moment, the lunacy of President Ahmadinijad. Iran’s parliament is seriously considering a law that would require the execution of apostates—those who convert to another religion from Islam—and this guy thinks Israel is just as nasty as Iran.

The rot in British culture and politics is deep indeed.

The latest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a Frenchman with the marvelously French name of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.

Perhaps his writing is quite as marvelous as his name, but the terms in which the Nobel committee praises him make me suspicious of their criteria. Much is made of the fact that he is “a traveler, a citizen of the world, a nomad” who stood out early in his career as “an ecologically engaged author.”

To be sure, the committee also says he has distinguished himself in a specifically literary way as a “conjurer who . . . lift[s] words above the degenerate state of everyday speech.” But why do I think they are even more pleased that he depicts the “ugliness and brutality of European society” which European cultural elites so often deplore?

And why do I suspect that his most recent work, a “deeply personal essay about the history of the art of film and the importance of film in the author’s life, from the hand-turned projectors of his childhood, the cult of cinéaste trends in his teens, to his adult forays into the art of film as developed in unfamiliar parts of the world” would strike the average reader as a tedious exercise in narcissism only precious members of the literati could enjoy?

But without question he has a marvelously French name.

Here’s a a sample of the Times’ (London) review, via Arts & Letters Daily, of Rowan Williams’ new book on Dostoevsky:

There are many insights in Dostoevsky: Language, faith and fiction which will illumine its subject’s novels, and which could only have come from this interpreter. Williams’s discussion of The Idiot, and the salience of Holbein’s painting “Christ in the Grave” (1521) for our understanding of the protagonist, is a case in point. “Holbein’s [deposition] shows (though this is not explicitly described in the novel) a corpse seen from alongside – not only a dead man fixed at a moment in the past (there are Orthodox depictions of the dead Christ and his entombment), but a dead man in profile, a double negation of the iconographic convention. In a fairly literal sense, this is a ‘diabolical’ image.” There will be few non-Orthodox readers who are aware of the fact, presented here by Williams, that in the tradition of icons, the only figures who normally appear in profile are demons or Judas Iscariot. This is a very pertinent addition to Williams’s accumulation of readings of the Idiot’s character. Far from seeing Myshkin as Christ-like, Williams alerts us to his “lethal weakness”: “the person who is presented as innocent and compassionate in Christ-like mode is in fact unwittingly a force of destruction”. With even greater precision, he hits the target with this paradoxical statement: “Myshkin is a ‘good’ person who cannot avoid doing harm” – about the neatest summary of The Idiot that has ever been written. In the conclusion to his book, Williams makes the striking claim that the fusion of incompatibilities in which so much of Dostoevsky’s work consists, creates something comparable to the traditions of icon-painting.

Read the whole thing here, and look for our own review of the book in a forthcoming issue.

A new study from the British Medical Journal has found that one in four terminally ill patients in Oregon who opt for physician-assisted suicide suffer from clinical depression:

Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law may not adequately protect the one in four terminally ill patients with clinical depression, a new study says.

The Death with Dignity Act was passed by the state in 1997, and there’s been intense debate about the extent to which potentially treatable psychiatric disorders may influence a patient’s decision to hasten death, according to a news release about the study, published online Oct. 8 by the British Medical Journal.

The act does contain several safeguards to ensure patients are competent to make the decision to end their life, including referral to a psychologist or psychiatrist, if there’s concern that a mental illness may be impairing a patient’s judgment. However, depression is often overlooked in mentally ill patients. . . .

While most patients who request physician-assisted suicide do not have a depressive disorder, the study authors suggested that “the current practice of Death with Dignity Act may not adequately protect all mentally ill patients.”

The LA Times today gives one more reason why embryonic stem-cell research should become unnecessary:

Scientists have converted cells from human testes into stem cells that grew into muscle, nerve cells and other kinds of tissue, according to a study published Wednesday in the online edition of Nature.

The stem cells offer another potential alternative to embryonic stem cells for researchers who aim to treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson’s by replacing damaged or malfunctioning cells with custom-grown replacements.

Scientists have also derived flexible adult stem cells from skin, amniotic fluid and menstrual blood.

The new cells were created from sperm-making cells obtained from testicular biopsies of 22 men.

They are theoretically superior to traditional embryonic stem cells because they can be obtained directly from male patients and used to grow replacement tissue that their bodies won’t reject, Sabine Conrad of the University of Tuebingen in Germany and her colleagues wrote.

A week from tonight at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin the Tallis Scholars will be singing music from the Spanish Renaissance:

Alonso Lobo
Missa Maria Magdalenae

Tomás Luis de Victoria
Three Lamentations for Holy Saturday
Dum complerentur

Francisco Guerrero
Ave Virgo sanctissima
Regina caeli
Maria Magdalene

Tickets are $40, or $24 if you’re 25 or under. If you are at all near New York and have any love of beauty, I highly recommend it. For more information and tickets, visit the Miller Theatre’s website.

An FT reader notes that Theodore Dalrymple’s diagnosis of FAS (False Apology Syndrome) was, in fact, identified by C.S. Lewis. The year was 1940, and it was the thing among young British intellectuals and Christians–“last-year undergraduates and first-year curates”–to denounce England’s involvement in World War II, blaming their country for the war and themselves for their country. A nice thought, but in his essay collection God in the Dock, Lewis points out the still-timely “Dangers of National Repentance”:

Men fail so often to repent their real sins that the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might appear almost desirable. But what actually happens (I have watched it happening) to the youthful national penitent is a little more complicated than that. England is not a natural agent, but a civil society. When we speak of England’s actions we mean the actions of the British government. The young man who is called upon to repent of England’s foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbor; for a foreign secretary or a cabinet minister is certainly a neighbor. And repentance presupposes condemnation. The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing–but, first, of denouncing–the conduct of others. If it were clear to the young that this is what he is doing, no doubt he would remember the law of charity.

Unfortunately the very terms in which national repentance is recommended to him conceal its true nature. By a dangerous figure of speech, he calls the government not “they” but “we.” And since, as penitents, we are not encouraged to be charitable to our own sins, nor to give ourselves the benefit of any doubt, a government which is called “we” is ipso facto placed beyond the sphere of charity or even of justice. You can say anything you please about it. You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practicing contrition. A group of such young penitents will say, “Let us repent our national sins”; what they mean is, “Let us attribute to our neighbor (even our Christian neighbor) in the cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.”

If you are a Christian graduate student you may be interested in the Harvey Fellowship. This program targets students “who possess a unique vision to impact society through their fields and who are pursuing graduate studies at premier institutions (top five) in their disciplines in the United States or abroad.” Applications are due November 1, so don’t delay.

From a reader, responding to Nathaniel’s post:

I had a habit of rereading the Lord of the Rings every year during the summer for a decade, and in the past three years, I’ve read the entire Patrick O’Brian series twice because times were bad, and I turn to swashbucklers when things are going rough.