Oh, I’m sorry. I messed up that title. Gore’s newest book will be called The Assault on Reason. Here’s the book description from : A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith bined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason… …We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate’s thinking, and America is in the hands of...

When the Vatican last week issued a stinging rebuke of Fr. Jon Sobrino, a noted proponent of Liberation Theology, plaints ensued about the Church squelching “dissent.” However, as Samuel Gregg points out, Fr. Sobrino’s books were not only based on faulty economic thinking, his works placed him outside the bounds of orthodox Catholic teaching about the faith. “For Fr. Sobrino, the ‘true’ Church is to be found in the materially poor at a given time, rather than in those who...

Kishore Jayabalan reported yesterday on the latest happenings with the Acton Institute’s office in Rome and the most recent installment of the Centesimus Annus Conference Series, “The Religious Dimension of Human Freedom.” As Kishore notes, the conference took place within the context of the spate of media attention to the religious situation in China, especially with reference to the relations between Beijing and the Vatican. Last month Acton’s director of research Samuel Gregg wrote in The Australian about the increasing...

Last week, Acton’s Rome office, Istituto Acton, held a conference entitled “The Religious Dimension of Human Freedom” at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. (See this Zenit piece for a brief, if unexciting, summary of the event.) In addition to the news angle concerning China, I’d like to say that all three speakers agreed on one point – the rivalry between Church and State on the claims of primary human attachments. This e as no surprise to students of...

I’ve discussed previously plex interrelationships between the next-generation gaming consoles and hi-def DVD formats, especially plicated by the pornification of culture and technology. So far I’ve focused on the battle between Sony’s PS3 (paired with the Blu-ray format) and the Xbox 360 (paired with the HD-DVD format), and argued that the hi-def formats rather than the porn industry itself would act as a decisive influence. In an recent Newsweek article, Brian Braiker conclusively exposes the vacuous nature of the often...

I grew up in the South. I also grew up during the Jim Crow era. I asked a lot of questions and made a lot of white folks very angry when I did. I hated the “separate but equal” hypocrisy and I was never, in my heart of hearts, sympathetic with the illogic of racism as I knew it. As a teen I was called into the senior pastor’s office and told to stop spreading racial unrest among the youth...

I have tried to read everything that I can find the time to digest on the subject of global warming. I saw Al Gore’s award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and even had some nice things to say about it. I have always been put off by the use of terms like “environmental whackos” and “earthist nut balls” from the political right. There is, in my humble opinion, little doubt that the earth is getting warmer. What is in great doubt...

John Armstrong’s thoughtful post below reminds me of the critiques of Jim Wallis offered in this space, here, here, and here (by Armstrong himself). And over at FirstThings today, Joseph Bottum, courtesy of David Brooks, gives me a term that I hadn’t encountered and that serves well as a moniker for the phenomenon Wallis embodies: “beyondism.” As in the effort (or rather the claim) to “get beyond” partisan polemics. As Bottum astutely observes, the program of the beyondist usually can...

Non-evangelicals and progressive Christians continue to throw their support Rev. Richard Cizik’s way. Now the Institute for Progressive Christianity has released a mending “the courage and Christian concern displayed by Rev. Rick Cizik and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) for mending preventive action on the issue of global warming.” Given the care that Cizik has ostensibly taken to distance himself from radical environmentalists, both of the secular and religious variety, and the care with which he has attempted to...

Hey, what can I say – sometimes in the great war to save Gaia, you have to do some… unsavory things, like killing baby polar bears so they don’t have to suffer the humiliation of being raised by humans after being rejected by their mothers. With an assist from our resident Photoshop genius, Jonathan Spalink, I humbly present this artistic token of support to our friends in the environmental movement, in the hopes that it will help them to educate...