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Spiritual Death of the West

The most important dystopian novels of the first half of the twentieth century are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Huxley and Orwell captured the two sides of modern despotism, one soft and seductive, the other hard and punitive. The most important . . . . Continue Reading »

Anti-Zionism Goes Woke

Like a starving zombie, identity politics bites into longstanding left-wing ideas and movements, reforming them in its own image. Anti-Zionists are not immune, as shown by Berkeley’s ­Daniel Boyarin, one of America’s leading Talmudists and Jewish philologists, the author of acclaimed books . . . . Continue Reading »

Knowing Animals, Knowing God

Should we care about extinction? We hear all kinds of numbers about this. At the top end, some claim that well over 10,000 species of life, animal and vegetable, are disappearing every year. This is exponentially higher than the “natural” (that is, not human-influenced) rate of species . . . . Continue Reading »

Letters

Dilemmas Matthew Schmitz presents many admirable points in his article, “Benedict Lives” (March 2023). Always respectful of opponents and careful to offer their viewpoints accurately before giving his own, Pope Benedict constituted a model of responsible theological dialogue.  Although . . . . Continue Reading »

1968 Is So Over

In 1883, speaking not as a novelist but as a bystander describing a terrible scene of carnage, Leo Tolstoy observed of what he documented: “We cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and we cannot believe that if we do not look, there will not be what we do not wish to . . . . Continue Reading »

Hazards of Nationalism

Anti-Christian vio­lence is on the rise in Israel. Jewish extremists have attacked Christian sites six times since the new year, compared to nine such attacks in the whole of 2021 and thirteen in 2020. At the Protestant cemetery on Mount ­Zion, Jewish youths desecrated more than thirty graves, . . . . Continue Reading »

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