Kishore Jayabalan, director of Acton’s Rome office, was interviewed by Radio Free Europe’s Jeffrey Donovan today about the Vatican’s reaction to a letter sent this week to Pope Benedict XVI by more than 130 Muslim leaders. The letter urged peace and understanding between the faiths, warning that the “world’s survival” could be at stake.
Read more on Jayabalan on Radio Free Europe: The Pope and Islam…
Truth is definitely stranger than fiction, with Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sharing this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
In recent years, the Nobel Committee has shown itself more and more willing to name the Peace prize for political reasons. In awarding Al Gore and the IPCC the Peace Prize, however, the Nobel Committee has lost all pretense to objectivity. Not only are Al Gore and the IPCC shamelessly partisan choices, but also irrelevant ones. Whatever one thinks of their crusade to convince the world of catastrophic, human caused global warming, it has precious little to do with furthering world peace.
Read more on The Nobel Peace Prize has lost all pretense to objectivity…
In a stunning turn of events, the Nobel Committee failed to award a Nobel Prize for Science to Al Gore, instead opting to present him with the Peace Prize despite the scant evidence that his recent climate change-related activities have contributed anything to the advancement of global peace.
Read more on Global Warming Consensus Alert: Gore Snubbed by Nobel Committee!…
“The mission in Iraq may be on the way to being accomplished…” So says Bartle Bull in Prospect magazine (HT).
Freemasonry has been deemed to be worthy of protection under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA).
Does this mean that freemasonry is a “religion”? A California court of appeals statement said in part, “We see no principled way to distinguish the earnest pursuit of these (Masonic) principles … from more widely acknowledged modes of religious exercise.”
Society is changing as economic freedom and diversification gradually creep into the Middle East. Dr. Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, explores the effects of free trade on nations including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates and, in turn, the effect those nations are having on their neighbors.
How’s this for an expression of un-Christian retributiveness?
If God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies – but not before they have been hanged.
–Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Überlegungen; quoted and translated in Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.
I used to have more regular and extensive interaction with people whose worldviews were starkly different from my own. That’s not so much the case anymore, so it’s good to be reminded occasionally that some people live in different worlds that are sometimes hard to comprehend. That happened today when I came across an announcment for a conference, “The Secular Society and Its Enemies.” In the strange universe in which the conference’s organizers live, “The world is finally waking up to the dangers of religious faith,” “The American courts are stacked with judges who openly denigrate the nation’s vital and historic separation of church and state,” and “societies the world over face the ominous threat of de-secularization.”
Normally, I’m not a huge fan of Congressman John Dingell. But on this issue, I have to at least give him points for honesty:
Democrats took over Congress vowing to make global warming a top priority, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to notch a quick victory with a bill that was long on political symbolism and cost, if short on actual emissions reductions.
Read more on Global Warming Consensus Alert: Points for Honesty…
Sonny Bunch reviewed “The Call of the Entrepreneur” and discussed the significance of the American Film Renaissance (AFR) in The Weekly Standard. His article is titled, “The Right Stuff: Conservatives decide if you can’t beat Hollywood, join it.”
Read more on The Weekly Standard, AFR, and “The Call of the Entrepreneur”…
