A Kept People
- May/June 2016
- May 1, 2016
There were times when Mark Twain’s humorous attitude toward religion was equal parts impudence and intuition: “There has been only one Christian,” he wrote in his 1898 Notebook. “They caught him and crucified him—early.”3 On many other occasions he wrote with far less subtlety and more direct disdain. Though if a reader then or now
READ MOREUpon his arrival in Boston on February 5, 1631, Roger Williams was welcomed with open arms, and the ecclesiastical authorities invited him to succeed Mr. Wilson (who was about to return to England) as a teacher in the Boston church. The Boston Puritans believed their church to be the “most glorious on earth,”
READ MOREThe niqab has entered the realm of law and politics in Canada. At issue is the question of what Islam requires in the way of female garb. The main terms to be understood here are the hijab and niqab. The hijab is a garment that covers the hair, at a minimum—perhaps also the neck and
READ MOREhe biblical book of Daniel tells a tale from the times of the Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar the Great. Babylon today is a pile of ruins about 50 miles south of Baghdad. But about 600 B.C. Babylon was the center of the world and its largest kingdom; founded by force of arms and culture. On
READ MOREWhen we were brought face to face with tyranny—with a kind of tyranny [Communism, Fascism and Nazism] that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past,” wrote Leo Strauss, one of the twentieth century’s leading political philosophers, “our political science failed to recognize it.”1 Actually many leading intellectuals of the twentieth
READ MOREOn February 13, 2016, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead while on a hunting trip in Texas. He had apparently died from natural causes during his sleep. He was a month shy of his eightieth birthday. The Scalia family declined an autopsy, and his remains were immediately returned to Washington, D.C., for
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