The ancient city of Smyrna, located on the site of today’s Izmir in Turkey, the gateway to Asia and stepping-stone to Europe, is sacred soil because of what happened there one Sunday, around 2:00 in the afternoon, in February of the year 155. On that day, Polycarp, the eighty-six-year-old leader of the Christian church in Smyrna, was cruelly put to death by fire and sword because he refused to renounce Jesus Christ. “For the blood of thy martyrs and saints shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places,” wrote T.S. Eliot. “For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ, there is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it.” Continue Reading »
Earlier this month, the California State University system decided to stop recognizing InterVarsity Christian Fellowship as a campus organization. This was far from being the first time that a campus ministry has faced such a challenge. Perhaps most famously, several years ago Hastings College of the Law withdrew recognition from the Christian Legal Society, resulting in a 2010 Supreme Court decision in favor of Hastings. InterVarsity itself has previously faced a number of challenges at a number of institutions such as Vanderbilt, SUNY Buffalo, and others. Continue Reading »
God may not be dead, but considering the imago Dei in philosophical discourse and public policy certainly is. Not only that, but the rational reasons for acknowledging the exceptional dignity of humans are wrongly denigrated as merely reflecting our religious past in which rigid moralism supposedly trumped reason. Continue Reading »
The performance of populist parties in Europe should be a warning for American conservatives. Those European parties (while they often vary greatly from one country to another) are consistently winning the votes of working-class white voters who feel abandoned by the political class. Similar forces are at work in America. The right can’t win (or can only win the narrowest and most fragile of victories) without them, so it must speak to them. Continue Reading »
As a kid growing up in Evangelical churches, I would occasionally hear about the ultimate in Christian travel—the Holy Land tour. And the tour would be followed up some months later by a slide show showing where its members had gone. The slides featured ancient stone buildings, panoramic views of Jerusalem, and sunglass-wearing Americans standing atop of the Mount of Olives with the golden Dome of the Rock in the background. But I don’t remember anyone ever talking about the Christians living there. There were pictures of churches, sure, but did anyone actually go to church there? Continue Reading »
On the evening of Sept. 12, 2006, my wife and I were dining in Cracow with Polish friends when an agitated Italian Vaticanista (pardon the redundancy in adjectives) called, demanding to know what I thought of “Zees crazee speech of zee pope about zee Muslims.” That was my first hint that the herd of independent minds in the world press was about to go ballistic on the subject of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture: a “gaffe”-bone on which the media continued to gnaw until the end of Benedict’s pontificate. Continue Reading »
Over the course of the last three hundred years, in broad swaths of the globe where Anglo-American and European thought has prevailed, history has been understood as the story of the advancement of human freedom. When there was debate, it was about what freedom meant and how freedom could be achieved. In the Anglo-American world, the larger concern was coercive power, and freedom was thought to be achievable through limited government and market commerce; elsewhere, the larger concern was scarcity and want, and freedom was thought to be achievable through greater state control of the economy and, sometimes, by harsh restrains on political liberty. Continue Reading »
Threats to religious liberty in recent months in the United States—forcing employers to buy abortifacients, compelling professionals and tradesmen like photographers and bakers to apply their talents to support “same-sex marriage”—have perhaps diverted Americans’ focus from similar assaults on religious liberty abroad. Two recent episodes in Poland, however, merit attention. Continue Reading »
I had a friend in graduate school who had come to the United States from England to pursue his Ph.D. in Philosophy. This was the 1960s, and he was much more enamored than I was with the “Ordinary Language Philosophy” that drew heavily on Wittgenstein’s approach. He was fond of quoting one of his Cambridge mentors, Professor John Wisdom, whom he reported as having said in a lecture that “all philosophical claims are either true and trivial or false and illuminating.” Continue Reading »
