The nation which hosted a large conference welcoming Holocaust deniers last year is now full of righteous indignation over historical inaccuracies in the film ’300′.
As Azadeh Moaveni reports from her daily travels in Tehran, “Iranians buzzed with resentment at the film’s depictions of Persians, adamant that the movie was secretly funded by the U.S. government to prepare Americans for going to war against Iran.” (HT: Disorganizational Behavior)
I’m planning on going to see the film ’300′ tomorrow, in all its IMAX glory.
This despite Scott Holleran’s quite critical review that calls the film “history hijacked by horror,” and says that “The script is filled with words—tyranny, freedom, reason—that go completely unsupported and have no meaning. The Spartans, portrayed as snarling animals seeking hostility for its own sake, claim superiority over mysticism, but cartoonish mystics inflict real damage, thereby negating the power of reason over faith.”
This piece from the Scientific American examines the difficulty that human beings have achieving happiness even in a world characterized by material prosperity.
“Once average annual income is above $20,000 a head, higher pay brings no greater happiness,” writes Michael Shermer, in the context of Richard Layrd’s observation that “we are no happier even though average incomes have more than doubled since 1950.”
John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, writes up a summary of the proceedings of The Historical Society’s conference, “Globalization, Empire, and Imperialism in Historical Perspective.”
“We urgently need an antidote to the journalistic clichés and the even more deplorable pseudo-scholarly discourse surrounding the interlocked themes of globalization, empire, and imperialism. We need the distance—the perspective—that good historical thinking affords. There was plenty of that on display in Chapel Hill, along with some muddle,” reports Wilson.
Jaroslav Pelikan, the great historian of the Christian Tradition, died May 13 at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 82 years old and had been battling lung cancer.
Pelikan wrote more than 30 books and over a dozen reference works covering the entire history of Christianity. Perhaps his best known work is the five-volume “The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine.” In 2003, he published “Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition.” He was Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University.
Pelikan, raised a Lutheran, was received into the Orthodox Church in 1998. His obituary on the home page of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary notes that Pelikan “often quoted a line from Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ which says, ‘What you have as heritage take now as task, and thus you will make it your own.’ Unlike most church historians, who focus on one period or one aspect, Dr Pelikan ranked as one of the only authorities in the entire field of Christian history. His books and articles included subjects as diverse as the New Testament, the Reformation, Saint Augustine, Kierkegaard and medieval philosophy, and he is credited with broadening Western church scholarship to include the Eastern Orthodox tradition.” In 2005, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press also published “Orthodoxy and Western Culture,” a collection of essays honoring Pelikan on his 80th birthday.
This is an article worth reading by Steven Waldman in the Washington Monthly, “The Framers and the Faithful: How modern evangelicals are ignoring their own history.” The article examines the attitudes of many 18th century evangelicals toward government, and specifically with respect to a number of the founding fathers, including Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry.
From the State of the Union:
“Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing.”
And all along I’ve been thinking it was divine providence.
As the nation prepares to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. on Jan. 15, it’s time to broaden the discussion of race relations in America to include not just blacks and whites, but Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans. The long fixation on black-white relations has obscured some important measures of racial progress — or lack of it — in American society, argues Anthony Bradley. “In fact, the greatest impediment to appropriating King’s dream is our unwillingness to move beyond a white social barometer,” he says.
There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere on Mark Steyn’s “It’s the Demography, Stupid”, which appears in today’s OpinionJournal.com and is originally published in the January 2006 issue of The New Criterion.
First item in this month’s Christianity Today Bookmarks.
Conclusion: “Disconcertingly, Stark argues without qualification, nuance, and the balancing of perspectives that academics love so much. Nonetheless, he may be right.”
