Tony Abbott is now Leader of the Opposition and is, notoriously, Catholic. Lots of folk in politics are Catholic, but TA is felt to take it particularly seriously, or something. So he and Laurie Oakes had this exchange:
O: I don't want to turn this into a religious inquisition so to speak, but I'd like to ask you one question. Do you believe in ( Read more... )

There are, possibly, greater terms expressing intellectual wankerdom than using ‘late capitalism’ and ‘late modernity’ other than ironically, but none that I find so transparently silly, annoying and pretentious.

We have no idea how long modernity has to run. We have no idea how long capitalism has to run.

None whatsoever.

So we have no idea ( Read more... )

I have, ever since I first become aware of it, loathed the politics of Plato’s Republic with its all-controlling Guardians and everyone in their controlled place. It has always struck me as the ur-text of totalitarianism.

It was reading Etienne’ Gilson’s God and Philosophy which enabled to see how Plato’s loathsome politics flows from his ( Read more... )

Christianity has two quite different attitudes to the authority of Scripture. One is that the Church (understood at the community of believers) creates Scripture. That is, Scripture is the particularly authoritative texts showing the interaction between inspired members of the Chosen People and God. Since the whole of Creation is God’s work-and ( Read more... )

Went to a talk this evening by an academic on Islamism and the response to it in the UK, SE Asia and Oz ( Read more... )

Prof. Richard Friedman’s The Bible with Sources Revealed is a highly accessible presentation of the documentary hypothesis. ( evidence )

James Carroll, the author of Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews - A History is a former Catholic priest. This only one of innumerable personal details one learns from what is a very personal book ( Read more... )

James D. Tracey’s Europe's Reformations, 1450-1650: Doctrine, Politics, and Community is a nicely comprehensive look at the European Reformation ( Read more... )

As a result of a comment on my post reviewing a book on the archaeological evidence for the Old Testament, I ordered K A Kitchen’s On the Reliability of the Old Testament, a book clearly written against reductionist views of the Old Testament’s historical reliability and particularly against the Finkelstein reading of the archaeological evidence ( Read more... )

Ira Lapidus’s A History of Islamic Societies has become a contemporary classic of history. Originally published in 1988, with a second edition in 2002, it is a one-volume history of an entire civilization from its origins to the present ( Read more... )