On the cusp
Lots of talk about how the “underwear bomber” was from a wealthy and cosmopolitan background in the media. Like the poverty = crime meme, the poverty & backwardness = terrorism meme is still floating around, though the evidence of the past decade o…
We are a social animal
Occasionally we get emails like this:
Up until now I thought I was the rarest of all ducks. A conservative atheist. I read Heather MacDonald’s piece in the Wall Street Journal today and was pleased to find I am not alone. I would love to know more about the organization.
Yours truly,
[name omitted]
One of the […]
Estimating black-white racial tension from 1850 to present
As a New Year’s gift, here is a free copy of an entry I put up on my data blog (details on that here). It’s a quantitative look at the history of race and culture in America, together with qualitative examples that illustrate the story that the numbers…
The Trouble With Forgetting Your Own History
The Trouble With Standing Athwart History:
But of course this is the trouble with basing your political value system on things like authority and tradition. It’s always changing! William F Buckley’s determination to stand athwart history yelling stop led him to a robust defense of apartheid as a system of government for the American South. At […]
How many Senators don’t have a university degree?
Only one out of 100! If you don’t know, this is the one.
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Cultures of constraint; Islam, India and Marxism
Pew has a new report, Global Restrictions on Religion (HT JohnPI). It illustrates rather clearly some general trends which I’ve been mulling over for several years looking at cross-cultural data. Here’s a 2-dimensional chart which plots the 50 most pop…
Food stamps and the importance of *doing something*
At Gene Expression I recently put up a series of posts relating to food stamps. For example, the correlates of food stamp utilization by county. I’m really skeptical of the ubiquity of food stamp usage. There are vast swaths of the United States where the majority of children benefit from food stamps. Some statistical analysis […]
The Ottoman years
Frustrated With West, Turks Revel in Empire Lost:
Mr. Osman’s send-off was just the latest manifestation of what sociologists call “Ottomania,” a harking back to an era marked by conquest and cultural splendor during which sultans ruled an empire stretching from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean and claimed the spiritual leadership of the Muslim world.
Ataturk’s […]
Implicit Eurocentrism & the eternal infidel
A friend pointed me to this article, Outrage on Swiss minaret vote, but how do Muslim states handle churches?. You don’t need to click, you know the score. To be a kuffar in a non-Muslim land isn’t always the most pleasant experience. Instead of imagining, you could probably just ask a black person who lived […]
A nation without divine favor
Reading Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism I am struck again by the peculiarity of the American nation, and its fundamental radicalism. I have already stated that this is implicitly an Anglo-Protestant nation. As a point of fact Protestant churches were established and supported in most American states at the Founding, with Massachusetts not […]
The limits of pluralism, and the necessity of an identity
I just finished Vali Nasr’s Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World. Very much in the mold of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. Nasr is the author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will […]
The malleability of political religion
The Big Money has an entry up, Karl Who? China is a Communist country, but I have yet to meet an actual Communist. After reading the first paragraph I began to think of the clear analogies between conventional supernatural organized religion and Marxist-Leninism, in particular, in its ideological flexibility (e.g., the transformation of the cult […]
Mythical heroes
There’s a new evangelical Christian college in New York, the King’s College. You can read a somewhat quizzical article in The New York Times about it. This part caught my attention:
Clues about the college’s philosophical underpinnings reveal themselves here and there. One bulletin board recently listed the activities of the various houses, the King’s College […]
Being wrong is good
I’m re-reading Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity now that I know a lot more American history than I did when I first read it in 2004. The book was probably written in the early 2000s, so it’s interesting to see what Samuel Huntington get’s wrong. In the early chapters he wishes […]
Fake fact: America is not secularizing
The whole post is at Gene Expression, but the chart to the left is the core of it. 1980-2008 can to a great extent be labelled a conservative era, when the New Right set the terms of the national debate on politics and culture. And yet concomitantly there was a massive secularization process, as 1 […]
Reviews of The Faith Instinct
Awhile back Mr. Bradlaugh mentioned he was going to review The Faith Instinct. His alter-ego has now put up a review. And so have I. Unbelievers have much to say about God on High.
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The rise of McChurch, but not Old Time Theology
Mr. Bradlaugh’s post on the death of intellectual Protestantism, the highbrow aspect of what we normally term “Mainline Protestantism,” prompts to revisit some data which I’ve reported before, but want to reiterate.
First, the old Protestant denominations which have dominated our culture and set the terms of the debate in terms of what it means to […]
Traditions and tribes; the genealogy of civilizations
A few weeks ago the socially conservative sociologist who blogs under the name “Inductivist” had an intriguing post up, Social conservatives and Muslims:
Social conservatives typically align themselves with the West against the Islamic world in the “clash of civilizations,” but it needs to be recognized that in some respects we have more in common with […]
Ross Douthat is back blogging
At The New York Times, Evaluations.
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