Because of the cultural whiplash I experienced in regularly attending two remarkably different family meals, I have always been fascinated by the range of conversations that pass for normal at other people’s homes at mealtime: what rituals and rules of discourse do parents invent, to what conventions do they default or aspire?….

Amy Chua, the Yale Law professor who wrote “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” the controversial chronicle of her own overambitious parenting technique, said her immigrant parents imparted to her a passion for academics ”” but not over dinner. “We did not say one word,” she recalled. Eating and television news dominated the meal.

In her own home, she said, she and her husband, the law professor Jed Rubenfeld, try to devote about half the meal to catching up on their children’s lives and the other half to “bringing up interesting cases with moral dilemmas.”

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The religion of Utopia is not unlike that of the Roman Empire, in that there is a state religion. “No one is forced to belong to it,” Dr. Boyle explains, “but in Utopia ”“ where everyone is reasonable and rational ”“ most people do because it is a reasonable and rational religion in accord with nature and philosophy.” All other religions, while tolerated and permitted, are considered to be superstitious. The only requirement is that all people must hold to the immortality of the soul, and to a final judgment of some kind. This is so as to motivate moral behavior. “It’s not a religious claim. It’s a social claim.”

“It’s very interesting when they talk about worship in Utopian religion,” Dr. Boyle notes, “They have very little to say about the object of that worship; they practice confession in Utopia, and the one person who is not confessed to is God. Children confess to their parents, wives confess to their husbands: nobody confesses to God.”

There is, however, an ironic application of the way Utopia enforces freedom of religion, as recounted by the character of Raphael Hythloday. “He tells the story of bringing Christianity to Utopia, and many Utopians apparently converted. But one convert’s apparently an obnoxious, overzealous convert, because he insists on the exclusive character of Christianity. He’s banished from Utopia on the grounds of the principle which is that no one should suffer for his religion.”

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What does it mean to be a Catholic university? This well-worn question emerges even more than usual these days in the face of budget cuts and increasing competition in higher education, as these universities have to identify what unique feature they offer prospective students that justifies their higher tuition costs. Alasdair MacIntyre, perhaps the most influential living philosopher, believes the answer to this question involves a significant place for the Catholic philosophical tradition.

MacIntyre begins his excellent book by raising a paradox for the Catholic Christian: her faith requires her to give unqualified trust to God but she simultaneously poses systematic questions about the God she claims to trust. These questions take the form of traditional philosophical problems for theists, such as the problem of evil, the relationship of body and soul, and how to speak meaningfully of a transcendent being. Thus MacIntyre identifies an apparent tension between faith and reason, a tension that the Catholic philosophical tradition wishes to dissolve.

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We ought to leave “happiness” to novelists and philosophers ”” and rescue it from the economists and psychologists who think it can be distilled into a “science” and translated into pro-happiness policies. Fat chance. Government can often mitigate sources of unhappiness (starvation, unemployment, disease), but happiness is more than the absence of misery. If we could manufacture happiness, we could repeal the “human condition.”

Somehow this has escaped the social scientists who want to make happiness the goal of government. They argue that economic output (gross domestic product) doesn’t measure everything that’s important in life ”” family, friends or religion, for example. True, but it doesn’t follow that “happiness” can be targeted as an alternative. No matter….

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…imagine how cool it would be if, by some twist of time, the National Archives were to make available detailed census information from nearly 70 years in the future ”” the 2080 census.

We asked James Dator, director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, what kind of information census takers will be soliciting seven decades in the future. Dator says that possible questions might include:

””Do you have a home, or “biophysical domicile”? If so, is it on Earth, the moon, Mars or elsewhere?

””What is your current sex?

””What is your permission number for drinking water?…

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If our hope is for salvation in.. [the] sense [of being safe from final annihilation when we die and will be happy eternally in our life after death]”” and for many that is the main point of religion””then this hope depends on certain religious beliefs’ being true. In particular, for the main theistic religions, it depends on there being a God who is good enough to desire our salvation and powerful enough to achieve it.

But here we come to a point that is generally overlooked in debates about theism, which center on whether there is reason to believe in God, understood as all-good and all-powerful. Suppose that the existence of such a God could be decisively established. Suppose, for example, we were to be entirely convinced that a version of the ontological argument, which claims to show that the very idea of an all-perfect being requires that such a being exist, is sound. We would then be entirely certain that there is a being of supreme power and goodness. But what would this imply about our chances for eternal salvation?

On reflection, very little. Granted, we would know that our salvation was possible: an all-powerful being could bring it about. But would we have any reason to think that God would in fact do this? Well, how could an all-good being not desire our salvation? The problem is that an all-good being needs to take account of the entire universe, not just us.

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Amidst the debris of postmodernism (a movement that has basically run its course) stands a great ambivalence about the nature of truth. The great intellectual transformation of recent decades produced a generation that is not hostile to all claims of truth, but is highly selective about what kinds of truth it is willing to receive.

The current intellectual climate accepts truth as being true in some objective sense only when dealing with claims of truth that come from disciplines like math or science. They accept objective truth when it comes to gravity or physiology, but not when it comes to morality or meaning.

One result of this is that we can often be heard as meaning less than we intend. When we present the gospel, it can easily be heard as a matter of our own personal reality that is, in the end, free from any claim upon others….

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The …[groups] opposing the change have been, in the main, religious. Behind the Coalition for Marriage, which is running a petition, are evangelical Christian organisations. The Catholic Church – where last weekend a judicious bishops’ letter opposing the change was read to more than a million congregants in 2,500 parishes across England and Wales – is the principal institutional campaigner, with the Archbishop of Canterbury also opposing the move.

They have laid out their reasons carefully and moderately, noting that marriage is a conjugal relationship of a man and a woman apt for the begetting of children who are raised by their natural parents; that this arrangement is both unique and uniquely beneficial to society and to children; and that there is something inappropriate about the state even claiming to have the power by law to redefine it.

They have been careful to point out how little this is about “gay” or anyone else’s rights (we would need to have the same debate if the call were for polygamy, or for siblings to marry) but about the meaning of marriage, and whether it should be preserved or altered.

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What has taken the place of religious commitment is the “economy” in the form of an ever greater consumption of the goods that science in the service of technology and industry delivers. Combined with an ever more malleable and mercurial “self” defined in terms of the fulfillment of material desires, the urge for infinite acquisition has become the default religion even of believers. This “religion” prevails even though in acting it out Christians violate their own religion’s claims that self-love and covetousness are close to the essence of sin. The religion is that of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,” or, more recently, “Whatever.”

Yet this state of affairs cannot last because neither science nor philosophy can prove the existence of individual rights, the maintenance of which is the liberal state’s only reason for existence. The ecological limits of indefinite production and consumption moreover threaten to topple the very foundations upon which this default religion rests.

This scenario in a few words characterizes the symptoms of liberal Western “civilization” and its discontents as sketched by Brad Gregory in The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Or rather liberal Western civilization and its “contentments.”

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Alain de Botton, the British pop philosopher whose new book Religion for Atheists has made him the friendly face of modern godlessness….said if you walked into a modern university and asked to study the humanities in order to find meaning in life, “the people in charge would immediately dial the number of the insane asylum, and you would be taken away.”

He said the message of the secular world is that life is simple, and the only people who need help are stupid people who read self-help books.

He set his own views against the “virulent strain” of atheism that sees religion as “not just false but wrong, ridiculous, malign and corrupt,” epitomized by Christopher Hitchens’ claim that “religion poisons everything.”

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Less optimistically than Marx, the democratic left today mostly thinks of money as a necessary evil. This nasty material has to be used to make markets function and it has to be accumulated. But it should be reined back as far as possible: the state should confiscate the maximum amount of numbers that it can and place them safely under the control of predictable verbal orders and regulations.

But could it be that in its implicit advocacy of words over numbers the left has all too readily embraced a capitalist notion of the nature of money? This notion assumes that money is necessarily a commodity – whether valid or illusory, as it was for Marx – and that the pursuit of wealth consists in piling the stuff up as high as possible….

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James Q. Wilson, a political scientist who coauthored the influential “Broken Windows” article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, which became a touchstone for the move toward community policing in Boston and cities across the country, died early this morning in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

He was being treated for leukemia, according to a family friend.

Dr. Wilson, who was 80 and lived North Andover, returned to Boston a few years ago to become the first senior fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College, and a distinguished scholar in the college’s political science department.

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I should like to focus on nothing””that is, on the various senses of nothing about which scientists, philosophers, and theologians speak””and the danger which follows from a failure to keep distinct these different senses. It may seem strange, but my task here is to make crucial distinctions about nothing….

Lawrence Kraus, however, simply rejects any appeal to notions of “nothing” which are beyond the explanatory domain of the natural sciences. As he said in an interview on National Public Radio in January: “the question of why there is something rather than nothing is really a scientific question, not a religious or philosophical question, because both nothing and something are scientific concepts, and our discoveries over the past 30 years have completely changed what we mean by nothing.” Krauss goes well beyond what most physicists would claim when he says: “the distinction between something and nothing has begun to disappear, where transitions between the two in different contexts are not only common, but required” (183). Indeed, he has a whole chapter on why nothing is unstable. In a way, of course, he is right. The “nothing” he attributes to various cosmological theories is really something. The distinguished French physicist, Étienne Klein, author of Discours sur l’origine de l’univers (2010), observes that, contrary to Krauss’ speculations, we do not have the conceptual tools to try to explain how something can come from nothing; indeed, “that which pre-exists our universe is never nothing,” since all change starts from a prior something….

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During the debate, it seemed that at the heart of Dawkins’ difficulty with faith is his impoverished view of God and is failure to grasp more than the most simplistic understanding.
Towards the end he asked the archbishop: “Why don’t you see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that we can explain the world, life, how it started, from nothing? … Why clutter it up with something so messy as a god?”

Dr Williams replied that he doesn’t see clutter: “I’m not thinking of God as being shoehorned in.”

Dawkins then said: “That is exactly how I see God.”

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Watch and listen to it all; it really is worth the time.

“Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular. . . . Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life.” Its vistas and mysteries propound “another world to live in,” and “another world to live in. . . is what we mean by having a religion.”

De Botton’s work is a laudable critique of what goes wrong in the old religions, which he seems to envy and about which he is nostalgic. “The religions” could take lessons from some of what he proposes. But it does not transcend the merely secular world, and does not appear to offer “another world to live in.” We’ll watch.

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Politicians and academics have paid tribute to a world-renowned Birmingham philosopher who “would not flinch from controversy” and who was once accused of heresy.

Professor John Hick, seen by many as the most influential philosopher of religion of recent times, has died just weeks after celebrating his 90th birthday.

The former University of Birmingham academic and church minister is remembered for helping to stop South African apartheid-era cricketers playing in Birmingham.

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[Søren] Kierkegaard has a beautiful devotional titled “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.” The basis for the book is James 1:8 and he spends the majority of the space in the book psychologically evaluating what it means to will one thing and what many of the barriers are to willing one thing. The title of the work alone speaks beauty and simplicity to me. I believe Kierkegaard is getting at the heart of Jesus with the idea behind this book. Jesus said that only one thing is necessary and he said that the law is fulfilled in one commandment: Love God and love neighbor.

One of my favorite illustrations in the book is when Kierkegaard writes of a man who is courting a wealthy woman. The double-minded man, the man who does not will only one thing, is pleased by the fact that his marriage to the woman will result in financial gain. The man without a pure heart allows his love for the woman to be tainted by her situation and the gain which will come to him as a result. The man who courts the wealthy woman and wills only one thing, the man with a pure heart, hates any financial gain he may come to acquire by his marriage to the woman. The man has a disdain for the woman’s wealth, not out of jealousy or in any way which causes feelings of contempt for the woman, but for quite the opposite reason. The man has contempt for the woman’s wealth because it presents the possibility of his love for her losing its purity. The man who wills only one thing wants to do nothing but love the woman with his whole heart and with a pure heart. Any other thing which may cause him to love the woman with any less than a whole and pure heart is an enemy. He wants only to love the woman and he wants nothing to get in the way. The man with the pure hearts acts in a way which eliminates other possible competitors for his love.

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Craig Bartholomew, a philosophy professor at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario, has been at work on a curious topic. “When people ask what I’m working on, and I say, ‘place,’ I get a blank stare,” Bartholomew says. But examples help. “The home is a place, the city is a place, the university is a place, the mall is a place, and the placial dynamic of all these places must be attended to for people to flourish.”

To exist at all, we must be somewhere. And as embodied creatures, we are implaced in specific contexts. Yet in contemporary culture, this aspect of human existence is threatened by what Bartholomew calls a “crisis of place” created by several elements of our technological society. To fully flourish as human beings””and to flourish as entire communities””Bartholomew argues, we need to recover the lost art of placemaking.

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Of the 20 or so T-shirts I own, about half make some reference to Jedis, midi-chlorians, or lightsabers. In 1999, on the day Episode I: The Phantom Menace was released, I bought tickets to three consecutive screenings and sat giddily through them all, Jar Jar be damned. When my dear friends had their beautiful baby boy late last year, I was thrilled to buy him a Boba Fett alarm clock desk lamp, the best gift I could imagine. I bought another one for myself.

If you’ve understood most of the references in the paragraph above, you, sadly, belong to the same wretched class of emotionally precarious quasi-adults in whose minds and hearts Star Wars occupies the realms others furnish with accomplishing life goals or forming meaningful relationships. Which is why the next line hurts: George Lucas has ruined our lives.
I don’t mean that in the obvious way, like the sorry stares my friends and I sometimes get from well-balanced, emotionally available adults when they overhear us discussing issues like the politics of Wookie society or why all spaceships seem to always have their engines on in full thrust yet none ever seem to accelerate. What I mean is that those of us reared on Star Wars too easily subscribe to its creator’s facile mythology that sees all religions as nothing more than particular facets of one grand universal myth and that has little use for cultural distinctions or theological depth. As his newly released production, the World War II film Red Tails, clearly shows, George Lucas’ world is a place where good forever battles evil on a landscape that is smooth and flat and unchanging. The same goes for his entire oeuvre.

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To avoid misunderstanding the phenomenon of homosexuality, we must grapple with the Achilles heel of research into the homosexual condition: the issue of sample representativeness. To make general characterizations such as “homosexuals are as emotionally healthy as heterosexuals,” scientists must have sampled representative members of the broader group. But representative samples of homosexual persons are difficult to gather, first, because homosexuality is a statistically uncommon phenomenon.

A recent research synthesis by Gary Gates of the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law School dedicated to sexual-orientation law and public policy, suggests that among adults in the United States, Canada, and Europe, 1.8 percent are bisexual men and women, 1.1 percent are gay men, and 0.6 percent are lesbians. This infrequency makes it hard to find participants for research studies, leading researchers to study easy-to-access groups of persons (such as visible participants in advocacy groups) who may not be representative of the broader homosexual population. Add to this the difficulty of defining homosexuality, of establishing boundaries of what constitutes homosexuality (with individuals coming in and out of the closet, and also shifting in their experience of same-sex identity and attraction), and of the shifting perceptions of the social desirability of embracing the identity label of gay or lesbian, and the difficulty of knowing when one is studying a truly representative sample of homosexual persons becomes clear.

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There are jobs for philosophers. But the irksome perception persists that a philosophy degree is only slightly more useful than an English degree, and so it was thought that a panel such as this might give frightened philosophers, many of whom came to this conference in search of gainful employment, some hope.

Philosophers: If you are pinning hopes of gainful employment on blogging, don’t.

But the three men on the panel have done so, and splendidly, with varying degrees of national recognition for their thoughtful punditry on political and cultural issues. Besides Sullivan, who has a Ph.D. in political philosophy and is known for his writings on conservatism and gay marriage, the other participants included Slate blogger Matthew Yglesias, who majored in philosophy at Harvard, and Grist magazine writer/blogger David Roberts, who has a master’s in philosophy.

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Last month, an expert panel of the Royal Society of Canada, chaired by Udo Schuklenk, a professor of bioethics at Queens University, released a report on decision-making at the end of life. The report provides a strong argument for allowing doctors to help their patients to die, provided that the patients are competent and freely request such assistance.

The ethical basis of the panel’s argument is not so much the avoidance of unnecessary suffering in terminally ill patients, but rather the core value of individual autonomy or self-determination. “The manner of our dying,” the panel concludes, “reflects our sense of what is important just as much as do the other central decisions in our lives.” In a state that protects individual rights, therefore, deciding how to die ought to be recognized as such a right.

The report also offers an up-to-date review of how assistance by physicians in ending life is working in the “living laboratories” – the jurisdictions where it is legal. In Switzerland, as well as in the American states of Oregon, Washington and Montana, the law now permits physicians, on request, to supply a terminally ill patient with a prescription for a drug that will bring about a peaceful death. In The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, doctors have the additional option of responding to the patient’s request by giving the patient a lethal injection.

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As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

—Disturbing the Peace : A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala (Vintage, 1991 paperback ed. of the 1986 original trnslated by Paul Wilson, 1990), p.11

The western tradition has infused and guided and built this nation, and all of us – whatever the position we hold in life – should take care to fight to retain it.

Eighteen months ago the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne – admittedly, an institution on the conservative side of our intellectual and political life – decided to launch a project in defence of western civilisation, and I was paid the honour of being invited along with Cardinal George Pell to a joint presenter at the launch.

The whole purpose, of course, was to remind people in all walks of life – and particularly those who might seek to influence public thought in Australia – that we should not take our inheritance for granted.

His Lordship Bishop Geoffrey Jarrett in his homily made reference to an issue of particular relevance: the attempt to persuade the Australian public to believe that changing the definition of marriage, which has lasted for time immemorial, is not an exercise in human rights and equality, but an exercise in de-authorising the Judeo-Christian influence in our society – and anybody who pretends otherwise is deluding themselves.

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Calling former Czech President Vaclav Havel a “friend and fellow prisoner,” the president of the Czech bishops’ conference said the entire nation owes Havel a debt of gratitude for its freedom and the new flourishing of Czech life and culture.

Archbishop Dominik Duka of Prague, who was imprisoned with Havel by the communists, asked that the bells of all Catholic churches in the Czech Republic ring at 6 p.m. Dec. 18 in memory of the former president who died that morning at the age of 75.

The archbishop, who met Havel in prison in 1981 and continued to meet with him after the end of communism in 1989, was scheduled to celebrate Havel’s funeral Mass Dec. 23 in St. Vitus Cathedral.

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Christopher Hitchens will be remembered as many things: an acerbic essayist, connoisseur of Scotch and cigarettes and roguish writer whose forceful pen was fueled by an imposing intellect.

Yet his impact on American life, which will be felt long after his death at age 62 on Thursday (Dec. 15), is likely to be the unabashed atheism he championed throughout his life, and the public voice he gave to growing numbers of unbelievers.

Even his foes””whose prayers he simultaneously welcomed and rejected as he battled esophageal cancer””say his acid-tongued arguments against God sharpened their own.

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In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about “progress” or “Enlightenment”””or about the past, the present, or the future? By all means, praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the mythology.

And yet, oddly enough, I like Pinker’s book. On one level, perhaps, it is all terrific nonsense: historically superficial, philosophically platitudinous, occasionally threatening to degenerate into the dulcet bleating of a contented bourgeois. But there is also something exhilarating about this fideist who thinks he is a rationalist. Over the past few decades, so much of secularist discourse has been drearily clouded by irony, realist disenchantment, spiritual fatigue, self-lacerating sophistication: a postmodern sense of failure, an appetite for caustic cultural genealogies, a meek surrender of all “metanarrative” ambitions.

Pinker’s is an older, more buoyant, more hopeful commitment to the “Enlightenment”””and I would not wake him from his dogmatic slumber for all the tea in China. In his book, one encounters the ecstatic innocence of a faith unsullied by prudent doubt. For me, it reaffirms the human spirit’s lunatic and heroic capacity to believe a beautiful falsehood, not only in excess of the facts, but in resolute defiance of them.

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In “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism,” published last week by Oxford University Press, he unleashes a blitz of densely reasoned argument against “the touchdown twins of current academic atheism,” the zoologist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, spiced up with some trash talk of his own.

Mr. Dawkins? “Dancing on the lunatic fringe,” Mr. [Alvin] Plantinga declares. Mr. Dennett? A reverse fundamentalist who proceeds by “inane ridicule and burlesque” rather than by careful philosophical argument.

On the telephone Mr. Plantinga was milder in tone but no less direct. “It seems to me that many naturalists, people who are super-atheists, try to co-opt science and say it supports naturalism,” he said. “I think it’s a complete mistake and ought to be pointed out.”

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