Can Islamists Reject Violence?

In the 1970s, the radical Islamist organization al-Gamāʿah ­al-Islāmiyah (Islamic Group) stormed onto the scene in Egypt, calling for Egyptians to return to the correct form of Islam by waging jihad and applying Shari’a. However, on July 5, 1997, the Gamāʿah did something extraordinary in the history of radical Islam. It issued “Initiative to Stop the Violence,” a formal statement declaring its renunciation of all violence. Continue Reading »

Some Public Theology Thickets

In trundling along on my path toward understanding how theological, cultural, social, and political conservatism are interrelated yet distinct things, I revisited a fine Heritage lecture by one James Ceaser called "Creed Versus Culture." There is no way to do justice to the whole lecture . . . . Continue Reading »

Spillover Effects

Over at the Confabulum I’ve tried to continue rolling out my conceptual brief against ideology . Part of my contention there is that in democratic times the allure of ideology is the condensation of politics, religion, and culture into a single, concise, comprehensive doctrine. A political . . . . Continue Reading »

In Re: Fresh Ideas

A possibility Helen doesn’t explore explicitly is that Obama’s broad but thin and vague popularity is in some significant measure the consequence of stale ideas on the right — or at least of the inability of the right to translate their ideas into practice. We should wonder more . . . . Continue Reading »

Brooks: Trouble in the Sense Field

The uncanny and unsettling distance between what seems and what is pops up again in David Brooks’s latest column . These are my bolds below: If you wanted to pick words to capture Patio Man’s political ideals, they would be responsibility, respectability and order. Patio Man moved to . . . . Continue Reading »