Peter J. Leithart on the Olympics as salvation by sport :
Like a billion other viewers, I caught some of the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Games earlier this week. It was a marvel of planning and choreography. The visual highlight in a breathtaking spectacle was the moment when the two-hundred and four burning petals, lit from seven torches, rose to form a single, monumental cauldron at the center of the Olympic Stadium.
Also today, Edward T. Oakes, S.J. on a Baltimore Catechism for New Atheists :
Freud and Nietzsche no doubt had their dogmatic commitments, but at least they would have recognized the sixth and seventh axioms especially as quite preposterous. They were too familiar with the evil lurking in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the human heart to think it could be expelled by the simple expedient of evicting God.
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