IN THIS previous discussion, a reader asks:

How is [the pervasive sublimity of Muslim architecture – or, for that matter, poetry or spirituality] possible for a civilization that is “inherently false and evil”? 

This is an important question (although, for clarification, it is important to note that I never asserted that Islamic civilization was false or evil, but Islam itself.) This question is important not just in regard to Islam but to all false doctrines that flourish, produce admirable works and create some civilized order. Please see Kristor’s outstanding and succinct response. In a few paragraphs, he explains why evil must and always will coincide with the Good. He writes:

If Islam is false, then Muslim saints, poets and architects who approach sublimity are all the more remarkable, for they have won through to the Good at the heart of all things despite their false religion. It should hardly surprise us that there are Muslims who have scaled such heights. The falsity of their religion does not annihilate their appreciation or capacity for beauty or goodness. Nothing can persist unless it has some good and truth in it. So even Islam expresses some truths. And everyone, no matter how many false beliefs he may hold, must if he is to live perforce confront and deal with the world as it really is: so that the truth of things must press upon him, and shape him. Anything that is, then, may by being the handiwork of God be also for some creature the occasion of a theophany.

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FEISAL ABDUL RAUF, the imam promoting the Ground Zero mosque, is a man for his time, the perfect lubricant for an ecumenism that acknowledges faith and at the same time renders it meaningless. See this excerpt from his book What’s Right with Islam in which he argues:

The language of good versus evil is precisely the language of the fundamentalists whose worldview we oppose. Once we define as evil those who counter us, we lose the moral high ground and begin to descend an exceedingly slippery ethical slope.

Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves.

I recommend the reader Brendan’s excellent commentary in this post. He writes: (more…)

CHRISTOPHER BURCHFIELD writes:

In 1981, the U.S. Forest Service entered into the Bernardi Consent Decree against the advise of its own attorneys within the Department of Justice. In essence, the Washington Office determined that 43% of its employees, within each of its some sixty professions and trades, should be women. Beginning, ironically enough in 1984, through the year 2000, a mass exodus of men with “on the ground knowledge and skills” took place in a purge so extensive that today no institutional knowledge of the 174 individual forests remains.   (more…)

LADY GAGA is an “overconceptualized and claustrophobic” performer whose image as “the voice of all the freaks and misfits of life” is slick marketing. So writes Camille Paglia in a long profile of Gaga in today’s Sunday Times. Paglia writes:

There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere. (more…)

PETER S. writes:

I find in practice that I rarely disagree with Laura on essential matters, and am rather pained to do so now.  With respect to the vigorous defense of traditional Christianity against Islam, this is perfectly in order and perfectly justified.  Christian civilization, to the degree that it can claim to be at all integral, has a right and necessity to defend its boundaries, both political and intellectual.  Further, as much as one might be attracted to the possibility of mutual respect and understanding, this is of little point if such requires either the dilution of theological positions or the unilateral letting down of guard. 

And yet, in light of the assertion that Islam is inherently false and evil, I am haunted by the thought of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi.  (more…)

PIZZA is to Americans what manna was to the Hebrews: a source of wonder and sustenance. Pizza, in all its forms, sustains us in the desert of modern life. It does not fall from the heavens, but it might just as well because it is available on almost every block. At this very moment, thousands of 18-wheelers are traveling the nation’s highways, hauling the necessary rubber cheese and factory dough to busy pizza vendors. Any town that is halfway civilized is a center of ceaseless pizza production. The “pizza paunch” is proof of this ongoing miracle.

Here is important breaking news on the pizza front.

The actress Julia Roberts, star of Eat, Pray, Love, says that pizza consumption has given her a fuller bust. The latest photos of Julia clad in a bikini while on vacation suggest she has undergone a transformation. But Julia says she did not have surgical augmentation. She just ate more pizza. (more…)

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:

There may be no excuse for it, but there is a very compelling and authoritative reason for the Vatican’s statement this week that the Koran must be respected and protected by Catholics. I discussed this reasoning several times in 2006-07 following the Regensburg Lecture Jihad and the pope’s pathetic surrender thereto. Why did he surrender to the rioting Muslims and renounce the penetratingly critical statements about Islam that he had made in Regensburg? Because the Church’s own authoritative documents from the Vatican II period, implanted in the Catholic Catechism, require Catholics to look at Muslims as “fellow adorers of the one God.”

Here is a 2007 entry at VFR in which I discuss the Catholic Catechism’s teaching on Catholics’ relationships with Islam. I’m quoting the entire initial entry. (The discussion following the iniitial entry is lively and I recommend it too.): (more…)

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

That mitered fool Cardinal Thomas McCarrick says, “We are committed to building a future in which religious differences no longer lead to hostility or division between communities.”  So is Islam.  Once all communities have submitted to Islam there will precisely “no longer be hostility or division between communities.”  The name for this is Sharia; the political form of it is the Caliphate.  In Euripides’ play The Bacchae, everyone rushes to become an intoxicated follower of Dionysus; in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, no one can resist the urge to become a bellowing pachyderm.  In both cases, great fear takes hold lest all not submit to the dehumanizing transformation; it is embarrassing to remain human.  As our elites rush to become dhimmis, I have the sick feeling that we are living out The Bacchae or Rhinoceros. (more…)

 HERE’S the main part of a shocking statement by Cardinal Thomas McCarrick and a U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops official released earlier this week: 

We are profoundly distressed and deeply saddened by the incidents of violence committed against Muslims in our community, and by the desecration of Islamic houses of worship. We stand by the principle that to attack any religion in the United States is to do violence to the religious freedom of all Americans. The threatened burning of copies of the Holy Qu’ran this Saturday is a particularly egregious offense that demands the strongest possible condemnation by all who value civility in public life and seek to honor the sacred memory of those who lost their lives on September 11. As religious leaders, we are appalled by such disrespect for a sacred text that for centuries has shaped many of the great cultures of our world, and that continues to give spiritual comfort to more than a billion Muslims today. (more…)

THE VATICAN and prominent Christians, such as the evangelical pastor Franklin Graham, have announced that it is morally wrong to set fire to the sacred texts of any religion, even a religion considered false and dangerous by the person lighting the fire. (more…)

BRENDAN writes:

You may be interested in Heather Boushey’s article from yesterday’s Slate/XX Blog, which attempts to minimize the recent study confirming that young women are, indeed, out-earning their male counterparts in America’s large cities. The summary: this isn’t a problem, because young women are better educated than young men. The main issue, for Boushey, is not that women are out-earning men, overall, but rather the supposed difference in pay between the women who are earning more money than men on average and the man in the office next door. In other words, it doesn’t matter that men in general are falling behind women in education and pay (in fact, that’s viewed as good … see below) — what matters is that the relatively few men who are highly educated are earning slightly more than women are.

The reason for this pay difference is that women tend to choose different jobs and also tend to work less when they choose the same kinds of jobs that men do. The Department of Labor study released during the final year of the Bush Administration (and which was suppressed almost immediately when Obama took office in 2009) confirmed these facts relating to the so-called “pay gap.” But that doesn’t stop feminists like Boushey from continuing to pound this misleading point in an effort to deflect attention from a much more troubling and substantive trend in the broader society: the decline of American men, in terms of education, work, pay, marriage, fatherhood and so on. (more…)

THE ANSWER to this question, which was raised obliquely in a previous thread, is no. The answer is no. A man should never hit his wife. What if his wife comes at him with a weapon? Then he should disarm her. What if his wife hysterically rages at him? He should walk out of the room or out of the house. What if his wife slaps him? The answer is the same; he should leave.

The Violence Against Women Act of 1994has created a domestic violence industry that does not protect the interests of the family and violates the constitutional rights of the accused, whom almost always happen to be men. I recommend Phyllis Schlafly’s piece here. She writes:

It seems elementary that husbands and fathers who are accused by their wives or girlfriends should have the constitutional rights accorded to any criminal, but they are routinely denied equal treatment under law, the right to a fair trial, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty and the right to own a gun. The accusation also destroys [a man’s] employability, which diminishes her income as well as his. (more…)

TIBERGE at Galliawatch discusses the shocking appearance of a Muslim contractor’s face on the Cathedral of Saint-Jeans in Lyons. [See her entry for September 2.] Underneath the gargoyle are the words, “Allah Akbar,” as well as “Dieu est Grand.” More photos of la gargouille musulmane can be seen here.

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A MIDDLE-AGED MAN I know was laid off almost two years ago. He could not find a new job in the private sector. After a long and desperate search, he finally took a position as a high school math teacher in a major American city. He now teaches 100 or so students a day and sadly returns to school this week, desperately depressed.

“Oh, I hate it,” he said recently. He has an engineering degree and is in his early fifties, with two children to put through college.

“Teaching” is far too strong a word for what my friend does and it is no wonder that he hates it. He is both prison warden and inmate, authority figure and whipping boy. He has no recourse against disruptive students and there are always three or four very disruptive students in his classes, thus very little is accomplished in the course of the day. The administration takes virtually no disciplinary action. If there is a serious problem, teachers are told to phone the police. Imagine being a teacher and having no recourse in the event of serious aggression but to call 911?

My friend is not permitted to consider behavior when grading. Suspensions and expulsions are rare, if not non-existent. Wherein lies this breakdown of authority? Why isn’t a teacher permitted to teach? (more…)

DALE F. writes:

Here’s a good article by Roger Scruton at the American Spectator on opera authentically done as the last refuge of the bourgeoisie.

I’m not as sold as he is on the quality of the Metropolitan Opera, but certainly compared to the sort of trashy European productions he singles out, the Met is superior. I think our own Music Academy of the West’s recent production of Don Giovanni was, in Scruton’s terms, nearly flawless. (Though to be clear about my own tenuous links to the bourgeoisie, at three hours, I found it a little long.) (more…)

THE DISCUSSION on what wives and mothers should call themselves continues here. In response to a reader’s comment that housewives should respond with defiant witticisms to any challenge, I write: 

[T]he hesitation for a woman to call herself a housewife does not purely stem from uncertainty or lack of confidence, it also comes from deference to other mothers. A housewife often feels she must hide what she has in the same way a rich person may feel the need to downplay his wealth. The housewife possesses great riches in the time she has to act upon her love for her children and husband and even though she may have traded material comfort and live in reduced circumstances in order to attain this gold, she may not want to show off her enormous wealth. Therefore she hedges when asked to describe who she is.

All this is inevitable in a society that does not explictly affirm the role of full-time mother and wife. A society that does not explicitly affirm this role becomes one that explicitly affirms the opposite: the absentee mother and wife. The idea of balancing social approval is a myth; such balance is impossible to achieve because these are mutually exclusive ideals. Society cannot approve contradictory standards.  (more…)