Category Archives: Rationalism

All technology is organized into Eras, which are rough estimates of progress through the games timespan. Anything in Era I is considered pre-1836 technology, going back as far as the very idea of Rationalism to the invention of Steelworking. Era II ranges from the start of the game to around the 1860s - Railways and Percussion Cap ammunition both belong here, though some countries did have railways a little earlier than 1836; this is not an exact science.

Era III runs from the early 1860s to the end of the 1880s and includes Civilizing Mission as a justification for colonization and Pumpjacks, heralding the rise of the oil industry. Era IV from late 1880 to the early 20th century includes both War Propaganda and Film, both of which might make it easier to justify the horrors which are to come in Era V - including Battleships, Chemical Warfare, and Stormtroopers.

Era V also sees truly modern civilian inventions such as the Oil Turbine to make Electricity from Oil and Paved Roads to improve your national infrastructure.

Paradox Interactive Victoria 3 - Technology spread is also affected by your Freedom of Speech Laws

The Eras act as an indicator of roughly where you are at in a given tree but also serves a role in ensuring that rushing a certain late-game technology is difficult. Not only do technologies in later Eras take more innovative effort to research, but each technology you have not yet researched in that tree from previous Eras makes it harder and harder to make progress. This means techs arent unlocked on specific years in Victoria 3, and there is never a hard block preventing you from making your Universities develop technologies earlier than they were historically invented.

The final yet crucial point about technological development is that government funding and steering of national research is not the dominant way most countries are exposed to new ideas.

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Technology will be soft-capped by the Era system in Victoria 3 - AltChar

Steve Franksky is dead. The musician and founder of the famous British band Bronsky Beat passed away on Thursday 9 December 2021. He was 61. Information about his death was provided by a friend from the band, who said goodbye to his friend in a touching post.

On Thursday, December 9, 2021, he died at the age of 61 Steve Franksky, Keyboard player and one of the founders of the British band Bronsky Beat. News of his death was shared on social media by his teammate Jimmy Somerville. It was with him that he founded the Bronsky Group, which won the UK rankings in the 1980s. The cause of death of the music star has not been made public.

Sad to hear the news that Steve Bronsky is dead. He is a talented and very melodic man. It was a fun and exciting time to work with him on songs and songs that changed our lives and touched many. Thanks for your music, Steve Tweeted in Somerville.

Steve Franksky, Jimmy Somerville I Larry Steinposek In 1983 they formed a band Bronsky Beat. They gained immense popularity with This One Song mentioned by Somerville.Smalltown guy. This episode was released in December 1984. The song that won the huge fan crowd, Reached number one in the world rankings. The music video for the song also generated a lot of interest, telling the story of a young homosexual man who escapes the evil that touches him and discovers Bronzky and Steinfossk, with whom he begins a new chapter in his life.

The Bronsky beat was very popular in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in Great Britain. Unexpectedly, heard about the group. In 2017 only, After 22 years The musicians broke their silence and released an album entitled The Age of Rationalism. Of the original row members of the group, only Steve Franksky was present. Somerville left the band in 1985 to form The Communards. Steinpoche, on the other hand, died in 2016 after a brief battle with cancer.

Steve Bronzky is from Glasgow and his real name is Steve Forrest. He died on December 8, 2021 at the age of 61. The cause of death has not been made public.

The Mom Talent singer is dead. She is 23 years old

American Got Talent participant has died. The sad news was confirmed by his mother. The circumstances of the death of the 23-year-old singer, who moved millions of viewers with her performance, are not clear.

Proud explorer. Freelance social media expert. Problem solver. Gamer. Extreme travel aficionado.

Originally posted here:

The famous composer is dead. Steve Frances died at the age of 61 :: Magazine :: RMF FM - brytfmonline.com

Just before the 1946 general elections in British India, Muhammad Ali Jinnahs All India Muslim League (AIML) was poised to become the largest party of Muslims in the region. In 1940, the AIML had declared its intention of forming a separate Muslim-majority enclave as a way to counter the political and economic dominance of Hindu majoritarianism.

AIML was formed in 1906 to safeguard Muslim economic and political interests in India. It was founded by groups of Muslim economic elites as a counterweight to the Indian National Congress (INC). The INC was founded in 1885. It had positioned itself as a secular nationalist outfit, but its core leadership and following were largely Hindu. And it had in its ranks some pockets of radical Hindu nationalists as well.

The AIML emerged as a Muslim interest group that had evolved from the ideas and activism of the 19th-century Muslim reformer Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. He had worked towards building an empowered Muslim class of intellectuals, civil servants, white-collar workers and businessmen in India. His modus operandi in this respect included reformist campaigns and the establishment of educational institutions to impart modern (European) knowledge to the Muslims. He also formulated a more rational and disenchanted reading and interpretation of Islams sacred texts.

The size and scope of the AIML remained minor compared to that of the INC, or for that matter, in relation to the Deobandi Islamist party Jamiat Ulema Islam-Hind (JUI-H) formed in 1919, and the radical Majlis-e Ahrar (formed in 1929). However, from the late 1930s onwards, the League lurched forward in an attempt to become the largest Muslim party in India, especially when the liberal barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah became its foremost leader.

According to the economist Shahid Javed Burki (in State and Society in Pakistan), the influence of AIML members from the urban Muslim middle-classes grew from the late 1930s. Burki is of the view that this undermined the influence that the landed elites had enjoyed in the League. In this context, the view of the late sociologist Hamza Alavi is slightly more nuanced. In an essay for the November 2000 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly, Alavi wrote that until the start of the Khilafat Movement in 1919, the AIML was a secular party willing to work with the INC to oust the British from the Subcontinent.

Alavi wrote that the Khilafat Movement that emerged in 1919 to protest the ouster of the last Ottoman caliph in Istanbul was quickly joined by INCs spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi. The Khilafat Movement was spearheaded by Islamist outfits and Muslim nationalists in concert with the INC. Gradually, the movement became more about the ouster of the British from India. According to Alavi, during this period, the AIML was stormed by Islamists who dislodged the partys secular leadership. Jinnah walked out in disgust, warning that the emotions driving the Khilafat Movement would mutate and turn inwards, spelling disaster for Indias Hindu and Muslim communities. This is exactly what happened. After failing to dislodge the British, the movement turned on itself when violence erupted between its erstwhile allies.

After the movement exhausted itself, the Leagues secular leadership rebounded and returned to a position of influence in the party. Burki attributes this to the rise of urban middle-class groups in the League. But here again Alavi takes a more nuanced view. He agrees that the partys secular leadership made a comeback after the collapse of the Khilafat Movement. However, he insists that this leadership, now headed by Jinnah, was not quite interested in carving out a Muslim-majority country. The pressure to do so came from landed elites who feared that an INC government would confiscate their lands. The pressure also came from Muslim salary-dependent classes who were facing increasing competition from the Hindu salaried classes. The latter had an advantage because they were in a majority and more qualified.

Hamza Alavi wrote that until the start of the Khilafat Movement in 1919, the AIML was a secular party willing to work with the INC to oust the British from the Subcontinent

Alavi and Burki agree that when time came to put the idea of a separate Muslim country as a promise in front of the electorate during the 1946 elections, the reasons behind this were almost entirely economic. Alavi wrote that the new country was not offered as a theocracy but as a Muslim-majority region where the economic and political interests of the Muslims would thrive in the absence of hegemonic Hindu majoritarianism. In a way, the Muslim nationalism which led to the creation of Pakistan treated the Muslims and Hindus as separate economic and ethnic groups. Religious differences between the two were not overtly highlighted.

This was because the League had put the nationalist impulse of Muslims in the public space but relegated Islams theological aspects to the private sphere. This is a major reason why Islamist outfits such as JUI-H, the Ahrar and Jamat Islami (JI) were critical of the Leagues programme. They warned that Pakistan would be a secular Muslim nationalist realm and its politics divorced from the faiths theological doctrines.

However, whereas the Leagues programme managed to get traction from Muslims residing in Hindu-majority regions of India, the party had to adopt a more populist line of action in Muslim-majority areas such as East Bengal, Sindh and Punjab. The Muslim populations and their political representatives in these regions were deeply rooted in colonial politics of patronage that had benefitted the Muslim landed elites. One of the largest political parties in the Punjab was the secular but conservative Unionist Party (UP). This party was the political vessel of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landed elites and a prosperous bourgeoise. Politics in Sindh, too, was dominated by landed elites, whereas in East Bengal, the Muslims were embroiled in a tussle with Hindu moneylenders.

Therefore, in East Bengal, the League formulated a strategy in which Pakistan was explained as country whose creation would eliminate the influence of the exploitative Hindus. Land reforms, too, were promised. Since East Bengal also had a large Hindu community within which there were tensions between upper-caste Hindus and so-called Dalits, the League encouraged the Dalits to opt for Pakistan and/or a country that would treat them as equal citizens. A prominent leader of Bengals Dalits, Jogendra Nath Mandal, joined the League with his followers. The Leagues election campaign in East Bengal, therefore, mostly revolved around local economic issues and tensions. Islam here was simply articulated as a religion of economic equality.

Unlike Punjab and East Bengal, where Muslims had razor-thin majorities, the Muslim majority was significant in Sindh even though the province did have a large Hindu minority (25 percent). Most of these were residing in Karachi, which was declared Sindhs provincial capital in 1936. The problem that the League faced here was that a faction of the Muslim nationalism that the party was advocating had broken away and mutated into becoming Sindhi nationalism. The League overcame this by co-opting various dimensions of Sindhi culture and placing them in the context of Muslim nationalism.

Secondly, even though there were historic tensions between Muslims and Hindu moneylenders, Muslim Sindhi politicians did not want to trigger Sindhi Hindus because the latter were vital components of Sindhs economy. However, when Sindh was declared a province in 1936 by the British, Sindhi Hindus had opposed the move. Sindh had been part of the Bombay Presidency since the mid-19th century. Opposition by the Hindus against Sindh becoming a province did create resentment amongst the Muslims of the province, but no communal violence took place. Sindh overwhelming voted for the League. Its voting pattern was also influenced by Sindhs landed elites. The Leagues programme was designed to appeal to the culture of religious syncretism in Sindh and to the desired unity of Sindhi Muslims.

During the campaigning phase of the 1946 polls, the Muslim Leagues politics in Punjab mutated into becoming what, decades later, the famous French philosopher Michel Foucault would call political spirituality

Punjab, where the Muslims had a slight majority, was a region where tensions between the Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were high. Major radical Hindu and Muslim religious groups were also headquartered here. The Unionist Party (UP) tried to keep things in check by distributing influential positions to prominent leaders from Punjabs main religious communities. The League was weak in Punjab. Nevertheless, due to the efforts of the partys student and youth wings, the Leagues programme did manage to attract certain Muslim middle-class sections in urban Punjab, a majority of Muslims resided in the provinces rural and peri-urban areas. Most of them were under the sway of large land-owning Barelvi pirs and radical Islamist groups.

During the campaigning phase of the 1946 polls, the Muslim Leagues politics in Punjab mutated into becoming what, decades later, the famous French philosopher Michel Foucault would call political spirituality. Before we investigate exactly what he had meant by this, we must first explore what happened in Punjab.

As tensions between Punjabs three main religious communities continued to increase, the INC began to support Islamist groups that had rejected the Leagues Muslim nationalism. These groups declared it to be anti-Islam and secular. They attacked the Leagues core leadership as being merely nominal Muslims who were Westernised and knew nothing about the theology of Islam. They claimed that they were responding to the Leagues Islamic propaganda against UP.

The League thought otherwise. To counter propaganda against Jinnah, the League unleashed clerics and ulema who had broken away from pro-INC Islamist parties such as the JUI-H. Clerics and followers of pirs were also activated once they decided to ditch UP and support the League. According to Ian Talbot (in the journal Modern Asian Studies, 1980), the pro-League ulema presented Jinnah as a saint of sorts, who was battling Muslim heretics and Hindus to create an Islamic state.

Talbot wrote that a majority of rural Muslims in Punjab hadnt even seen Jinnah. Yet, they were made to imagine him as a spiritual leader who was a true Muslim compared to the ulema who were castigating him as a wine-drinking secularist who had no knowledge of Islam. This was actually true. To Jinnah, a Muslim nationalist state was not a theocracy but a modern nation-state in which Indias Muslim minority would become a majority and pursue its economic interests in a more fluent manner.

It was during this campaign that claims of creating a new Madinah and the slogan Pakistan ka matlab kya: La illaha illAllah were heard for the very first time. These claims and slogan were products of Islamists who had joined the Leagues election campaign in the Punjab. The League managed to win the largest number of seats in the province, followed by INC and UP. The pro-League Islamists were so successful in usurping the rhetoric and doctrines of anti-League Islamists that outfits such as the Ahrar were wiped out in the election.

But this success constituted a problem that still haunts Punjab to this day. The Leagues message was moderate in Sindh and almost socialist in East Bengal. But it became increasingly Islamist in Punjab. When riots broke out between Hindus and Sikhs on the one side, and Muslims on the other in Punjab, most Muslims in the province saw this as a battle between Islam and kufr.

The League had no plan whatsoever to create a theocracy. Nor a socialist state, for that matter. It was to be a state based on high authoritarian modernism i.e. when a state believes that every aspect of society can be improved through robust centralisation and rational and scientific planning. The Islamic aspect in the context of Pakistan was to remain limited to Muslim majoritarianism and nationalism. This created confusion in Punjab, that had witnessed an emotional election campaign with Islamist messages galvanising Muslims to vote for a new Madinah and violence that was perceived as a cosmic war between good and evil, Islam and infidelity.

During a League convention in Karachi, soon after the creation of Pakistan, a man stood up and asked Jinnah whatever had happened to the slogan Pakistan ka matlab kya: La illaha illAllah? Jinnah asked the man to sit down, then explained that no such resolution was ever passed by the party (to make Pakistan an Islamic state). Jinnah scoffed that some people might have used (this slogan) to gain votes (in Punjab).

This success constituted a problem that still haunts Punjab to this day. The Leagues message was moderate in Sindh and almost socialist in East Bengal. But it became increasingly Islamist in Punjab. When riots broke out between Hindus and Sikhs on the one side, and Muslims on the other in Punjab, most Muslims in the province saw this as a battle between Islam and kufr

Jinnah had underestimated the impact of the Islamist rhetoric used in Punjab during the election, and the manner in which the mad violence that had erupted was perceived by the Punjabi Muslims. Conditions that had formulated these perceptions were not addressed. They continued to resurface: the 1953 anti-Ahmadiyya movement in Punjab; the even more violent anti-Ahmadiyya movement of 1974, centred in Punjab; the emergence of Deobandi sectarian militant outfits and anti-Shia violence, with their core area of action being Punjab; and recently, the rise of the militant Barelvi Sunni party the TLP. What is more, according to data, between 1992 and 2021, over 70 percent of incidents of mob violence and lynchings (against persons accused of committing blasphemy) have occurred in Punjab.

On Political Spirituality

Political spirituality is a term that was coined by the late French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1978. Foucault was one of the earliest exponents of postmodernism, a late 20th century movement that was characterised by an emphasis on relativism and subjectivity as opposed to absolutism and objectivity. It declared the death of modernity and the birth of a postmodern world in which new ideas and realities were emerging outside the absolutist concepts and truths established by rationalist post-17th century European philosophers, and even by science.

Postmodernists posited that realities which do not meet the established criteria of objective and scientific truths were not untruths. They insisted that these untruths were truths according to the subjective realities that they existed in. To postmodernists, these subjective realities needed to be studied from outside the economic, social and political frameworks enacted by absolutist/objective ideas.

Postmodernisms immediate roots lay in the so-called New Left movement that had begun to surface when Soviet troops invaded Hungry in 1956 to brutally crush protests against the Soviet-backed regime in Budapest. New Left leaders and scholars began to intensely critique the politics of pro-Soviet communist parties in Europe and of contemporary Marxism.

Their aim was to refurnish Marxism with issues that went beyond class struggle. Therefore, the New Left not only took to task post-World War II capitalism, consumerism and new forms of US and European imperialism, but also lambasted Stalinism and/or Soviet communism for being imperialist, dictatorial and oppressive.

The ideas of the New Left were largely expressed during the worldwide student uprisings of the late 1960s. One of the most intense was the 1968 student revolt in Paris. For a moment, students pushed the conservative Gaullist regime in France to the brink of collapse. Instead of marching to the tune of the ageing pro-Soviet communist parties, many young men and women were carrying pictures of the Chinese communist ideologue and leader Mao Zedong.

The figure of Mao Zedong fascinated various young ideologues of the New Left. Mao, after leading a communist revolution in China in 1949, had announced a Cultural Revolution in 1966 to completely weed out counter-revolutionaries, not only from society, but also from within the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). Mao unleashed mobs of young men and women on the streets of Chinese cities.

Rampaging mobs attacked people accused of being bourgeois. Thousands of Chinese were killed or committed suicide after being humiliated for becoming decadent and harbouring bourgeois thoughts. The economy came to a standstill and millions of students dropped out of educational institutions to take part in the carnage. But since the countys borders were tightly shut, much of what came out of China as news was designed to present the Cultural Revolution as an event that had galvanised a whole people to oust clandestine agents of capitalist decadence, manipulative bureaucrats and corrupt party officials. What is more, Mao had also cut ties with the Soviet Union.

Young leftist activists and intellectuals outside China romanticised Mao as a man of admirable impulse and revolutionary genius, who was inspiring millions of people to smash the tyranny of rational bureaucrats and the scheming bourgeoisie. But as New Left movements began to fail and recede, the horrific truths about the Cultural Revolution began to trickle in. The heroic communist superman was no better than Stalin, Mussolini or Franco. He wanted to hang on to power, even if that meant unleashing mindless mobs on imagined enemies.

When Mao finally came under increasing criticism in European leftist circles for flouting human rights and instigating violence, Foucault declared that the idea of universal human rights was meaningless because the concept of rights changed from culture to culture. He wrote that specific philosophers were needed to explore specific cultures and specific truths. This was, of course, an attack on the whole concept of the universal principles of human rights that were a product of the Enlightenment. A rejection of the concept of universality in any field would become an important plank of postmodernism, replaced by the exploration of specific understanding of specific cultures about their specific truths.

Fascination with Mao among many European intellectuals eventually fell away. In fact, by 1977, when the last remnants of the 1960s radicalism had called it a day, Foucault suddenly became a champion of universal human rights. Thus began a shift in the new European left that moved from eulogising those who had crossed the Rubicon and inspired millions to partake in acts of collective passion, to becoming relativist cultural beings, detached from realpolitik and divorced from ideologies woven from meta-narratives.

However, the earlier fascination with Mao could not stop postmodernists from continuing to applaud expressions of impulse and iconoclasm. Of course, it was conveniently overlooked at the time that just before he announced the Cultural Revolution, Mao had begun to be censured by his contemporaries within the CPC for imposing unscientific economic policies that had created devastating famines in the countryside and killed millions of people. So what better way to wipe out critics by declaring them as counterrevolutionaries, then getting them humiliated, tortured and even killed by mindless mobs?

But men such as Foucault had had their fill of Marxism, in all its forms. To them, it was yet another expression of rebellion that was rooted in the European paradigms of revolution, largely formulated by events such as the 18th century French Revolution. This is why Foucault, who was once so excited by the organic nature of Maos Cultural Revolution, completely ignored the 1979 socialist Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. Instead, in search of all things new and exotic, he got extremely interested in the events taking place in Iran.

The centrality of God and Church had begun to recede during the outbreak of the Enlightenment. Modernity in this respect reached a peak in the mid-20th century. But in the 1970s, religion was making a comeback. Especially in the Muslim world. Foucault and his early postmodernist contemporaries had understood Nietzsches bermensch as a spiritual being, but quite unlike the religious leaders who had begun to water-down their faith so that it could fit the paradigms of modernity.

So, Foucault became smitten by the charismatic Shia cleric Ayatollah Khomeini.

Foucault travelled to Iran twice in 1978. He closely studied the writings of the Iranian scholar Ali Shariati. Shariati is widely hailed as the father of Irans 1979 revolution, even though he died two years earlier. He was suspected to have been poisoned by the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavis secret police.

Shariati was not a cleric. In fact, just as the New Left had done in the West, Shariati reworked Marxism so it could be liberated from dogma and was able to address a wider range of issues. Shariati did this by expressing reworked Marxist ideas in the language of revolutionary Shiism. He projected these ideas as being already present in the events of the Battle of Karbala (680 CE) when Husayn (AS), the grandson of Islams Prophet (PBUH), refused to give allegiance to the caliph Yazid because Husayn considered him to be a tyrant and a usurper.

In his writings from Tehran, Foucault claimed to be witnessing the birth of powerful ideas that Western intellectuals had not known about

Khomeini adopted this narrative and worked it to mean a passionate and fearless uprising against the tyrant and usurper (the Shah) and the establishment of an Islamic theocracy navigated by pious men. This meant Shia clerics, of course. This was Khomeinis interpretation of Shariati. But the fact is, it was a Shia version of what Sunni Islamists such as Pakistans Abul Ala Maududi (d. 1979) and Egypts Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) had already conceptualised as a way to oust the modernist and Marxist ideas that had become prevalent in Muslim societies and were supposedly undermining the supremacy of Islam.

To Foucault, an atheist, Christianity had been overcome by secularism because it became decadent, corrupt and devoid of any spirituality. This, to Foucault, had left the rational West spiritually bankrupt. So, here he was now, in a non-Western country, watching a mighty revolution unfold that was being shaped by what Foucault called political spirituality.

In his writings from Tehran, Foucault claimed to be witnessing the birth of powerful ideas that Western intellectuals had not known about, or thought did not exist. As he saw Khomeini push the limits of rationality and cross the Rubicon in declaring the creation of a theocracy that had shunned secular ideas from both the left and the right, Foucault wrote that this had the potential of creating new forms of creativity.

He excitedly declared that political spirituality had the potential of destroying Western philosophy and even engulf Western politics that had been under the sway of Enlightenment ideas for far too long. Foucault did not hide his enthusiasm of being at the epicentre of a new kind of revolution, which he claimed was unlike any other. To Foucault, the revolution was a passionate onslaught against the idea of modernity that had been imposed on spiritual societies such as Iran.

For Foucault, the audacity of challenging military might by anti-Shah protesters demonstrated a sacrificial disposition. The fact that the protesters and their leaders were unconcerned by how they would be judged by the democratic/capitalist West and the communist powers impressed Foucault, who understood the uprising as a completely new phenomenon, because it was taking place outside the context of established political and ideological norms. Foucault felt that it was entirely being driven by a political manifestation of spirituality that was inherent in Islam, or at least in how Shariati had defined Islam.

Although there is no evidence that Foucault ever studied the violence in Punjab during Partition, or commented on it, one can suggest that too was an expression of political spirituality. During the violence, Muslims in Punjab demonstrated a sacrificial disposition and thus the constant reminder by many in Pakistan of how our elders sacrificed their lives to make Pakistan. Secondly, the mob violence and lynchings in Punjab (by Muslims as well as Hindus and Sikhs) during Partition suggests that those involved thought little or nothing about how they will be judged by those pleading for a return to sanity. The British were clearly shaken. As Foucault might have put it, they were trying to understand the audacious nature of communal violence through European historiographies.

Indeed, in India, communal violence had become endemic ever since the late 1920s, but the violence that took place during Partition was unprecedented. Had Foucault studied it, he could have been a bit more measured in his understanding of the Iranian Revolution. But whereas the sacrificial acts of revolution driven by the emotionalism of religion did manage to give the Muslim League an important win in Punjab, in Pakistan it was quickly suppressed by the state.

What if it had been allowed to roll on? The result might have been a theocratic state such as one enacted in Iran. But the aftermath, too, would have have been similar. Iran became an Islamic Leviathan a totalitarian theocracy headed by clerics who, to eliminate all opposition, had to unleash a reign of terror through mass executions. By rejecting the two devils, the US/West and Soviet Union, and then getting embroiled in a war with Iraq and proxy wars with Saudi Arabia in Lebanon and Pakistan, Iran was left internationally isolated. And the internal carnage continued. In the late 1980s, Iran carried another round of mass executions and then instigated violence in other Muslim countries by accusing the West of promoting blasphemy against Islams holy personages (the Satanic Verses affair).

As reports of summary executions, political repression and the degradation of the status of women started pouring out after the revolutions victory, Foucault gradually stopped discussing Iran. After glorying it as a product of political spirituality that the West could not comprehend, he remained quiet about the atrocities that this kind of politics often triggers. He even remained quiet when homosexual people began being rounded up and executed. Foucault was homosexual himself, but one who was now back in Paris. He was vehemently criticised for remaining silent and even for being naive.

Political spirituality, therefore, was no different than the anti-religious impulse of the murderous Jacobins in revolutionary France or the atheistic disposition of the Khmer Rouge who killed millions of people in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. There was nothing unique about political spirituality, because it took the same trajectory that all violent upheavals often do.

A source of everyday power

Postmodernism had developed such a reactionary attitude towards how history was studied (especially of dialectical materialism) that Foucault completely undermined how most violent uprisings emerging from whatever ideology turn out. Violence becomes part of the polity. It becomes a source of everyday power.

This became a norm of sorts in Pakistan, mostly in Punjab. Islamist groups were suppressed during the first two-and-a-half decades of the country. They developed a seething hatred of the modernist elites who had tried to quash the religious sentiments unleashed during the 1946 election campaign in Punjab and by the communal violence that followed. The eruption of the 1953 anti-Ahmadiyya movement and then the more successful 1974 anti-Ahmadiyya movements in Punjab is when the suppressed sentiments once again came to the surface. In 1974, they were appeased by the state and government in the hope that they would weaken when given space in mainstream scheme of things. The opposite happened. The mainstream got radicalised.

This process accelerated when the state too began indulging in political spirituality. A paradox emerged. The more the state attempted to co-opt and monopolise the impulse and emotion of radical Islamism, the more radical society became because it saw the states acknowledgment and practice in this context as the disposition to adopt, mostly for the sake and attainment of everyday power.

Religious, sectarian and sub-sectarian violence increased manifold. But there was only so much that the state and non-Islamist politicians could appease, monopolise or usurp. If a space to express political spirituality was lost to the increasingly Islamising state, Islamist groups formulated newer and even more militant and violent expressions and spaces to push the boundaries of rationality to which the state was still bound.

The Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) did this by exhibiting audacious levels of militancy, sending suicide bombers to explode in marketplaces, mosques and schools, and playing football with the heads of soldiers belonging to the Pakistani military that they had captured and then executed. In a 2018 essay for the Journal of Strategic Studies, the forensic psychologist Karl Umbrasas writes that terror outfits who kill indiscriminately can be categorised as apocalyptic groups. According to Umbrasas, such groups operate like apocalyptic cults and are not limited by socio-political and moral restraints.

Such groups are thus completely unrepentant about targeting even children. To them, the children, too, are part of the problem which these groups believe they are going to resolve through a cosmic war. The idea of a cosmic war constitutes an imagined battle between metaphysical forces: good and evil, God and Satan, Islam and kufr. Suicide bombers, imagining themselves as soldiers in this cosmic war, exhibit the sacrificial disposition of political spirituality that Foucault was so smitten with.

On the other hand, the TLPs audacity in this context can be found in the crass tone that their leaders unapologetically use in their speeches, and more disconcertingly, in the emotional fulfillment that its followers seem to get from brutalising alleged blasphemers.

A majority of mob lynchings and assassinations of those alleged to have committed blasphemy have taken place in Punjab. One wont be wrong to assume that Islamist violence here is the echo of the 1946-47 communal violence. It is an echo that has only gotten louder. The states response, ever since the late 1970s, lies in the mistaken belief that it can lessen the impact of this echo by monopolising it through certain appeasing policies, laws and rhetoric. This has only emboldened those the state wants to keep in check.

On the other hand, the continuing phenomenon of Islamist violence, especially mob lynchings in Pakistan (particularly in Punjab) hasnt been studied as deeply as it should. Such studies can be problematic if conducted by institutions of higher education in Pakistan. But many Pakistani academics operating in universities in Europe, and especially in the US, havent done a stellar job either.

If a space to express political spirituality was lost to the increasingly Islamising state, various Islamist groups simply formulated newer and even more militant and violent expressions and spaces to push the boundaries of rationality to which the state was still bound

The audacious and sacrificial 9/11 attacks in the US and the manner in which they impacted the Muslim diaspora in the West saw many Muslim academics in the US adopt postmodernist and post-secular ideas. This was in response to the criticism that Muslims began to attract after the attacks.

A most surreal scenario appeared in some of the top Anglo-US universities and think-tanks. As US troops invaded Afghanistan, and Pakistan became a frontline state aiding the US against militant Islamists, and as Westerners grappled to understand as to why a group of pious Muslims would ram planes into buildings full of ordinary people, a plethora of young Muslim academics were given space on campuses and in think-tanks to explain to the Americans what had transpired.

The surreal bit was that this space was provided despite the fact that the academics were wagging their fingers at secularism, liberalism and what they saw as enforced modernity. These were not Islamic modernists of yore who would try to demonstrate that things such as democracy and secularism were inherent in Islam. Nor were they insisting that radical Muslim states needed to be secularised. Instead, they were postmodernist caricatures, drenched in lifestyle liberalism and operating in Western institutions, but looking for a third way to define Muslims outside the Western secular contexts.

They claimed that contemporary cultural traditions and exhibitions of piety in Islamic societies had a rational base, but that this rationalism was according to a societal ethos that was different from the secular ethos of Western modernity. This fascinated their Western patrons but, at the same time, Islamists gleefully adopted such narratives as well.

For example, many US-based Pakistani feminist-academics criticised their Pakistan-based contemporaries for facilitating attacks on Muslim culture by insisting on promoting secular and modernist feminist narratives. Ironically, this is exactly what conservatives and Islamists in Pakistan accuse the liberals of doing. It can also lead to rationalising the ways in which Islamist violence is used, not only by apocalyptic groups, but also by common Muslims to exercise everyday power.

Link:

Foucaults Political Spirituality, Punjab And TLP - The Friday Times

By James C. Sherlock

Americans are at one anothers throats over critical race theory in schools.

The debate is skewed and the rage fueled by completely different understandings of the terms of reference the actual objections to CRT in education.

Those objections have been misstated routinely by the legacy national newspapers and the education press. The misleading articles make it into most national newspapers these days with the collapse of regional reporting. And the misinformation they spread has made it into these pages.

Education Week, in a surprise change of pace for that journal, published on November 15 an opinion piece by Rick Hess titled Media Coverage of Critical Race Theory Misses the Mark.

Based upon a detailed study of a years worth of press reports, Hess finds that the national legacy media and the education press have largely and purposely ignored the core objections to CRT in schools.

Instead they have misled the public with a selective and progressive-friendly, but inaccurate definition of the terms of the debate.

Virtually every article reviewed reported that anti-CRT factions dont want the history of racism and slavery taught in schools. For the vast majority of those who protest CRT in schools, including Virginias governor-elect, that is not a consideration; they donotoppose teaching the history of racism and slavery, but they want it taughtaccuratelyandin context.

These same articles have been silent on race-based separation of kids into privileged and oppressed groups as a teaching tool and head-on attacks on equality, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. Those are in fact the crux of the anti-CRT objections.

These articles mis-define the terms of the debate to make opponents of CRT in schools look either unserious or racist or both.

They continue to build straw men in order to burn them down. This failure of journalism in support of woke dogma has poisoned the debate both in these pages and nationally.

Rick Hess is an education policy scholar at theAmerican Enterprise Institute(AEI). He opens with:

The postmortems of this months elections have reminded us once again of just how large a shadow critical race theory has cast over K-12 schooling this past yeareven though we still cant quite seem to agree on just what it means or whether its even taught in schools.

He studied 91 articles addressing CRT between Sept. 2020 and August 2021 published in TheNew York times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street JournalandUSA Todayas well as the education press (Education Week, The 74andChalkbeat).

Two-thirds of mainstream-press news accounts and more than 4 in 5 education press news stories mentioned the history of race or the way history is taught in schools. Most articles mentioned slavery. And the articles routinely asserted or implied that these kinds of issues are at the heart of the CRT debate, as when The New York Times reported that the CRT debate is really about how the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people.

At the same time, news articles rarely mentioned CRTs intellectual foundations, despite the contentious claims on which it rests. As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, two founders of the CRT movement, have explained in their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. Yet, of the 91 articles examined, just two mentioned that CRT is skeptical of rational thought and only one said that CRT is skeptical of universal values or objective knowledge.

Put another way, then, one could read more than 95 percent of CRT coverage and never encounter the extraordinary claims at the heart of a raging national debate.

It turns out that the CRT fight isnt over whether to teach about slavery (in fact, Texass oft-maligned anti-CRT law mandates that schools teach a unit on slavery) so much as it is about a series of controversial practices that deserve careful scrutiny.

Unfortunately, that kind of examination hasnt been forthcoming.Indeed, its almost as if the media had set out to make the skeptics and critics look unserious by giving short shrift to their actual concerns about what CRT means in practice.

He has nailed it. We see all of that in the debate in these pages.

I strongly recommend to all both Mr. Hess article and hisdetailedreport, Medias Misleading Portrayal of the Fight over Critical Race Theory, on which it was based.

It would be useful if we were arguing over the same facts.

*****

This article originally appeared on December 1, 2021, on baconsrebellion.com. Used by permission.

Link:

Press Misinformation on Critical Race Theory in Schools Fuels the Fight - The Roanoke Star

The industrial revolution brought a question at the heart of designthe relationship of function to formto a point of crisis. Architectural aesthetics is grounded in a structures formal clarity. Classic architectural elements like post and lintel construction telegraph their functions in their shapes; such legible forms are then quite naturally echoed in ornament. Ornament in such cases is simply an articulation, a coming to representational consciousness of the buildings essential structure.

Modern building techniques like steel frame construction and reinforced concrete did away with many of the habitual constraints that made structure legible. The materials are so powerful and so plastic that their functions become obscure, non-intuitive. Thus the question of aesthetic form is brought to a painful crisis point. When all functional limitations are overcome by material virtuosity, why this shape rather than that?

In the post-war era, the international modernist movement dictated a rationalistic minimalism to answer this question. No ornament was suggested by the material itself and none could be justified with cultural or spiritual rationales under the newly secular, egalitarian, and capitalist society; thus, no ornament was called for.

In successive decades, the resulting boring buildings were challenged by an uprising of the human spirit called Brutalism (for bton brut, raw concrete, but etymology seems to be winking here). Concrete became the medium of untrammeled human invention: matter was willed into previously undreamed-of shapes. But when entirely unaccountable to the natural order expressed in traditional building methods and materials, pure human invention produces something timeless only by the rarest strokes of genius.

Tired of the dated jubilance of both modernism and post-modernism, the millennial generation has turned not a new page, but to the immediately preceding era. The pre-war urban industrial district has become the center of gravity for todays urban culture, as techies and creatives take up residence in rehabbed nineteenth-century warehouses and developers fill in gaps in these desirable neighborhoods with stylized imitations. Among the many shared qualities of the new elites digs, one stands out like a gleaming ember: theyre brick.

Is brick intrinsically hipster? The association may be incidental. The Golden Age of American Brick was also the Golden Age of American Urbanism, not as an ideal but as a practice. The districts constructed during this period, with the eras favored building material, evoke an epoch redolent with hipster values. In the warehouse, railroad depot and repair yard, streetcar powerhouse, fire apparatus bay, and mercantile office of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was expressed the material form of an authentically urban economy, one whose logic was as yet undiluted by the space-annihilating automobile. But Im inclined to think brick per se has qualities that justify its pride of place in the era of urban revival we may or may not be living in.

The merits of the material itselffired clayare manifold. Brick has been used since the earliest extant structures of the human patrimony. Having already been subjected to the purifying fire, it is fire-proof. The material has local character depending on the color of the earth and clay in a particular area. Bricks can be red, orange, brown, yellow, black, or bluish grey, and in a thousand shades depending on the vagaries of the firing process; the application of a glaze further broadens the spectrum of possibilities. And brick is cheap, much cheaper than stone.

Beyond the material, there is its power as a medium. Brick is modular: a single unit that can repeat in as many sequences as you can think of. If asked to sketch a brick wall, most of us would likely draw in a bricklaying pattern known as stretcher bond: rows (known as courses) of bricks oriented the long way and offset from the courses above and beneath exactly halfway through each brick. (We might call this Lego bond.) If pushed to think about it a bit more, however, it wouldnt take long to realize that the number of possible patterns in which the bricks can be laid is something more like infinite.

Stretchers are bricks laid with their long face showing; headers show the bricks short face. These two basic orientations give bricks the same fertile sequential potential as binary code, with stretchers as 1s and headers as 0s. Thrown in variations in color and even for a simple wall the possibilities are dizzying. Then bring in the third dimension: the possibilities of bricks laid in a hounds-tooth orientation, offset headers creating texture, corbelling (successive courses set forward or back to create a cornice or dome or simply to widen or taper), the interspersal of open space at a magnitude as small as to create a perforated wall or as large as to create bays and arches.

All this at the unit of a wall. Compose walls into a building

The point of highlighting the modular quality of brick is not simply to dazzle the reader with magnitudes of possibilities. There is something in modularity that makes the modern heart rejoice, not unrelated to the analogy to binary code. Western culture has swung as a pendulum between rationalism and romanticism from pre-Socratic days (atomist Democritus vs. all-things-flow Heraclitus) down to our own (modern Bauhaus vs. postmodern Venturi Scott Brown). A medium both reducible to atoms and constructable into flowery wholes stands a good chance of giving successive, otherwise warring generations each something to appreciate.

Why do this historical eras buildings specifically lend themselves to incarnating a renewed urban vision? The great urbanity of the industrial districts is in part due to the adaptability of their form to new uses. The factories and warehouses of this era featured large open floorplates, extensive natural light through large, gridded windows, and the bay unit, a roomy, repetitive unit nicely adaptable to partitioned units or rooms in a redevelopment scheme.

This adaptability is what makes these buildings not just historical curiosities or architectural specimens, but an urban phenomenon. What distinguishes the political community from any other kind of community, Aristotle argues in the opening of his treatise on the polis, is the ultimacy of the good at which it aims:

Every state [] is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good. (Politics, I.1)

As I explained in a journal article for Open Philosophy, City in Code: The Politics of Urban Modeling in the Age of Big Data:

Aristotle describes this highest, political good not as if it were a distinct interest that city-dwellers happen to share alongside their particular interestsfor instance, a taste for parades and flags, or commissions and committees as we might imagine the civic todaybut rather as a more ultimate goal capable of justifying those particular interests:

When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state [] comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life. (I.2)

On this account, cities are created for survival, coming into being as individuals seek to meet their basic needs through cooperation, specialization, and exchange. But this very coming together introduces the possibility of a goal beyond survival: that of the good life. This new goal then sustains a mode of lifethe political, or urbanthat is no longer reducible back into the realm of mere survival, but rather has to do with what makes survival desirable in the first place.

The brick buildings Ive been discussing incarnate this pattern quite literally: having originated in the bare needs of life, they continue in existence for the sake of a good life. (Indeed, the digital marketing agencies and weekend food delivery box companies occupying these buildings often make a business of The Good Life.) Part of what makes much of our cities inhuman is that the artifacts we furnish them with rarely outlive their purpose serving the bare needs of life, and thus rarely carry us into the dimension of the good lifebecause they simply dont continue in existence.

Once an urban artifact has outlived its initial pragmatic purpose, as these old warehouses have done, it raises a new kind of question for its users. It forces them to ask if there is a meaning to human culture that is not reducible to immediate aims. Thus brick takes its place among other favored materials of the millennial generation: leather, wood, wool, iron. All are media with clear origins in nature, elevated by human craft into purposeful, beautiful, and lasting artifactsand, thus, ideal media to incarnate the paradoxes of the good life in a disenchanted age.

Madeline Johnson is from Minneapolis. Sheholds a master of Urban Planning degree from McGill University. This New Urbanism series is supported by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Follow New Urbs on Twitter for a feed dedicated toTACs coverage of cities, urbanism, and place.

Continued here:

On Brick - The American Conservative

Named for the great English writer, philosopher and convert to the Catholic faith, G.K. Chesterton, the first Chesterton Academy was opened in Edina, Minnesota, in 2008.

Today there are 33 Catholic schools providing a classical education within the Chesterton Schools Network in the United States and Canada, one in Iraq, a sister school in Italy, and more than a dozen slated to open in the next year.

The good news is that one of those schools will be opening right here in Grass Valley. As many parents in our community are seeking an alternative to public school for their students, the Chesterton Academy of St. Patrick, opening to high school students in the fall of 2022, may be their answer.

Why a Catholic school education? Catholic schools understand the multi-faceted nature of child development and are heavily invested in the well-being of their students. They seek to develop the whole child by engaging the human need for physical, mental, social and spiritual nourishment.

Chesterton Academy schools embrace three pillars of formation for each student: intellectual, learning what is good; character, forming habits of virtue; spiritual, man is made for more.

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They use a tried-and-true approach to classical education which has withstood the test of time and provides the best and most nutritious food for the mind. Each years instruction builds upon the previous one, and the results are that students recognize the order of things and understand cause and effect; think more logically and rationally; become more aware and more appreciative of beauty and truth; and are articulate, clear-thinking, well-rounded, and most importantly, joyful.

Students at Chesterton Academy enjoy a cohesive, content-rich classical education. They benefit from a broad exposure to many disciplines, which helps them expand their interests and their critical-thinking ability. History, literature, philosophy and theology are braided together. The sciences and humanities are intimately connected so that the logic of math is seen in philosophy.

The curriculum is impressive and rigorous. Freshman literature classes will focus on Homer, Aeschylus and Virgil. By their senior year, students will have been introduced to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Orwell and more.

History begins with the study of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and Persia, ancient Greece and Rome, continues on with the early Medieval period, the Crusades, the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance period, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and culminates with concentration on colonization and exploration, the American Civil War, the two World Wars, the Communist and Cultural Revolutions, and the Cold War.

In philosophy, freshman will study Socrates, Plato, and formal logic, arriving at the study of rationalism, idealism, liberalism, utilitarianism, and Marxism in their senior year.

Science curriculum will take the student from astronomy and physical science through biology, chemistry,and into physics, including Newtonian physics, electricity, and magnetism. Mathematics instruction will include analytical geometry, algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus, calculus and statistics.

Equal emphasis is given to language and arts so that every student gains an appreciation of music and art, and learns to draw and paint, sing in the choir, act on stage, give speeches and engage in debate.

The Chesterton Schools Network showed an incredible resilience during the nationwide lockdowns due to Covid-19. While schools all over the country were closing their doors, nine new Chesterton Schools were opened in the fall of 2020.

One sign of growth of the network of schools came from an unexpected place. This September, the Chesterton Academy of St. Thomas the Apostle opened in Irbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

In the summer of 2014, more than 120,000 Iraqi Christians were uprooted from their homes in Mosul and the Nineveh Plain by Islamic State militants and sought refuge in the Irbil Archdiocese. The archdiocese coordinated emergency aid, housing, education, and pastoral care for the displaced families.

When Archbishop Bashar Warda of Irbil learned of the Chesterton Academys classical model, he was determined to bring it to Iraq as one of several initiatives he established to help Christians remain in Iraq.

Need more reasons to consider Chesterton Academy of St. Patrick for your student? According to the National Catholic Educational Association, 99% of Catholic secondary school students graduate and 88% percent continue on to attend college.

In general, on national and standardized tests, Catholic schools consistently outperform public schools and other private schools by as much as 20 percentage points.

And its affordable. Chesterton Academy of St. Patrick is striving to keep tuition at approximately $7,500 per year, less than half the cost of Jesuit High School in Sacramento.

Our children are the heirs of our future. Brimming with a natural wonder, joy and zeal for life, they have the brightest hopes and biggest dreams for the world around them.

Catholic schools value their students and strive to create an educational experience in which their students thrive while celebrating learning, developing talents, and creating lifelong bonds. They understand that our children are the movers and shakers with the power to determine the course of history.

A family information night will be held on Monday, Dec. 6, from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the large hall at St Patrick Church, at 235 Chapel St. All are welcome to attend, regardless of religious affiliation, and learn more about Chesterton Academy of St. Patrick, coming to Grass Valley in 2022. Or you can visit http://www.caofstpatrick.org , email info@caofstpatrick.org, or call 530-273-2347.

Terry McLaughlin, who lives in Grass Valley, writes a twice monthly column for The Union. Write to her at terrymclaughlin2016@gmail.com.

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Terry McLaughlin: Why a Catholic school education? - The Union

Evangelicals today are tarred with the brush of right wing conservatism, seen by many as the loyal henchmen of Donald Trump and the opponents of progressive social change. But in the 19th century, evangelicals had the opposite reputation, condemned by many as the promoters of dangerously progressive and socially disruptive reforms.

That is the takeaway from a fascinating article by historian Joseph Zeitz on the controversies over Abraham Lincolns proclamation establishing the Thanksgiving holiday. In the article, entitled When People Thought the First Thanksgiving Was Too Woke, Zeitz describes how the holiday was received in the context of the Civil War, in which the national polarization was even more intense that it is today:

For years, many Southerners and pro-slavery Northerners had pilloried the Republican Party as an organization of religious fanatics bound by a commitment to extreme and even (for the time) zany evangelical reform movements in the words of Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the black republican army is an allied army, composed of Know Nothings, Abolitionists, Free Soilers, Maine Liquor Law men, womans rights men, Anti-renters, Anti-Masons, and all the isms that have been sloughed off from all the honest parties in the country. While some of these movements strike the modern reader as incongruous, in the antebellum era, some of the strongest advocates of abolition and womens rights also wanted to restrict immigration and impose sobriety on a nation of heavy drinkers. Race the debate over slavery and abolition was always at the center of the political debate. But it intersected with a broader array of cultural concerns. . . .

It became increasingly popular for administration critics to lump the offending religious reform movements under the moniker of Puritanism, given the central role that New England played in organized abolitionism. It made little difference that Puritanism bore nothing in common with evangelical Christianity, either intellectually or theologically. By 1863, the term had become a political descriptor, devoid of its original meaning. The Republican Party, as one Confederate political cartoonist portrayed it, was built on the foundation of PURITANISM, supported by pillars that included WITCH BURNING, SOCIALISM, FREE LOVE, SPIRIT RAPPING, RATIONALISM and NEGRO WORSHIP.

Puritanism, said influential Peace Democrats like Clement Vallandigham and Samuel Cox, was the origin of all the isms that had propelled America to war.

And, of course, Puritanism was associated with the New England Pilgrims, so a holiday associated with that ilk made quite a few Americansnot just Southerners but also northern Democratsgo ballistic.

There is a lot to think about here. Ironically, Democrats were the ones who opposed the evangelicals both then and now. And back then Republicans were very much the party of social reform and, as they are today, was identified with religious-motivated voters. Over a century and a half, we have seen quite a bit of political and ideological realignment, and not just with religiously-motivated voters.

Also, the basket of causes includes lots of seemingly incongruous beliefs. We must keep in mind that the opponents of Christian activism back then are not necessarily fair and accurate in their charges, any more than they are today. (Accusing the Puritans of fostering free love seems like quite a stretch, but so does accusing modern-day Christian conservatives of insurrection and fascism. Although free love was an issue with the new so-called libertarians, as the explanation of our illustration shows.) Interestingly, the Christian activists back then were associated with the evils of rationalism, whereas today the New Atheists accuse them of irrationalism. And promoting restrictions on immigration was an issue for evangelicals both then and now.

It was true, though, that the Christian activists of the 19th century promoted the abolition of slavery, giving women the vote, and other social reforms (labeled here socialism), all of which were quite progressive. In fact, another prominent and related cause, the prohibition of alcohol, was also considered to be politically progressive. (In fact, some progressives are coming to the same conclusion today. See this article: Maybe Prohibitionists Were the Good Guys.)

The point is, it isnt just that Christian political activism has changed: progressivism and conservatism have changed. And todays categories dont really apply to the fairly recent past. Was Lincoln a liberal or a conservative? The question is meaningless. One of the most radical 19th century reformers was William Jennings Bryan, today known mainly for his opposition in the Scopes trial to the teaching of Darwins theory of Evolution. And, it has been argued, that todays progressives are todays Puritans. Indeed, the New England Puritans were the ones who adopted the social gospel, which became a dogma of mainline liberal Protestantism but would be the antithesis of the evangelical understanding of salvation. But in the 19th century, these different strains had not yet gone their separate ways.

There are different ways of drawing the lines. They keep shifting over time. And they will shift again in the future.

Christians should probably avoid committing everything to a transient political philosophy as applied to a transient temporal situation. But standing up for transcendent moral principlesfor example, opposition to slavery and opposition to abortionis an obligation in every age. That might be interpreted in different ways in different timesone would think that being pro-life is a progressive positionbut that shouldnt matter to the Christians.

Illustration: The Great Republican Reform Party, Calling on Their Candidate, [click link for the explanation and identification of the cartoon] via Picryl, Public Domain

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When Evangelicals Were Considered Too Progressive | Gene Veith - Patheos

Professor George Paxinos is arguably one of the greatest minds in the world, having identified and named more brain structures in rats and humans than anyone in history.

Like many brain cartographers before him, hes also principally published his work and research in books 58 to be exact. These works have led to advancements in the prevention, treatment and cure of brain and spinal cord diseases, disorders and injuries.

But Professor Paxinos has also always had the urge to write a fiction novel focused on environmental concerns, such as deforestation and climate change. This urge has led to the publication of his new thrilling environmental crime novel A River Divided.

Speaking with The Greek Herald after the release of A River Divided, Professor Paxinos says the novel came out of a continuous defeat in things that I tried to do to protect the environment.

In the 1980s and the 1990s, Professor Paxinos was the principal advocate for the return of trams to Sydney, founding The Light Rail Association of which he served as President. The Association aimed to reduce reliance on the car and reduce atmospheric pollution.

But despite Professor Paxinos best efforts, the tramway infrastructure of Sydney was not preserved and once the CBD and South East Light Rail network began to be built in October 2015, the environmental impact was huge.

I was frustrated because I was losing every time and I thought if I were to write a novel, as they werent many novels on the environment back then, that I might be able to take the reader with me and make change in behaviour upstream from action that is, to change attitude, Professor Paxinos says.

After making this decision to write the novel, the neuroscientist began to think about a plot and he says it came to him one night at a Christmas Party in 1999.

I was with some friends and someone asked me what were doing and I said, were going to Spain and they asked, if youre going to Spain why dont you visit San Juan de Compostela? The church where the bones of St James are buried, Professor Paxinos explains.

I thought at that moment, Ill take some DNA and see what the guy looked like but then I thought, why not someone far greater? The idea of cloning the remains of Jesus came to mind and having him look at the world today and seeing what his reaction would be to the environmental issues that are facing us.

Its from this moment on that A River Divided was born.

The novel begins withJesus DNA being discovered and then cloned to bring twins into the world.Separated by circumstance, the twins are unaware of each others existence and they live completely different lives. One day, they coincidentally meet and come to logger-heads over a project in the Amazon rainforest that could threaten life as people know it.

This narrative is so well-written and meticulously researched that its no surprise it took Professor Paxinos 21 years to finish writing it in a way which pays homage to religion, the environment and science.

Of course, I had my day job but it was more so that novel writing is a different skill to scientific writing. I thought it would be a good transfer of skills, he says.

I had the background [as] I was teaching neuroscience. I had also a long-standing interest in the environment so I had that benefit but still, it is a lot of work to make the words.

Despite this, the words Professor Paxinos did use in A River Divided dance across the pages as a demanding tango between scientific rationalism and literature.

Its definitely a novel you dont want to miss!

More here:

Professor George Paxinos' 21-year writing odyssey comes to an end with 'A River Divided' - Greek Herald

Image Courtesy of Webster-Kirkwood Times

By Angela Hickey

Human beings have created art for as long as we can remember, but is there any science behind this constant creation? One Kirkwood artist has taken up this mission in order to answer the question, is there a link between art and science?

For the past decade, artist Bob Dick of Kansas City, MO known professionally as R.H. Dick has been involved with Creativity and Madness, an organization founded by Yale psychiatrist Barry Panter, whose main mission is to study the link between art and science. The group has published three volumes of psychological case studies; their latest features a section by Dick himself.

Creativity and Madness was founded in 1981 through The American Institute of Medical Education (AIMED) to provide education for scientists and physicians in the name of discovering the scientific links between psychology and art. Preaching the importance of searching outside the fields of science in order to keep up analytical research, Creativity and Madness searches for new ways to link the arts and the sciences.

These cats are fascinated by the artist because most of them are quantifiers. Theyre scientists, said Dick in an interview with The Webster-Kirkwood Times. Theyve been saddled with numbers and the scientific method since the Renaissance. Guys like me come in here and we talk about the vibe, the joyce, the things from beyond. They look at us bug-eyed. It blows their minds.

The group features prominent figures, from neuroscientists and physicists to brain mappers and surgeons. The group of researchers gets together to hold conferences to hear from artists like Dick about what drives them to do what they do.

Theres power that art has that modern man is just beginning to realize, Dick said. What is it about art that we just seem to be drawn to? Its that power that hasnt really been analyzed yet. We know that art changes the brain, but we dont know why and thats why theyre intrigued.

Dick was featured in Creativity & Madness most recent case study, discussing his time in the artist colony of Taos, New Mexico. Visiting for the first time at age 12, Dick felt an unexplainable force in the surrounding pueblos and returned to Taos numerous times over his career.

How to describe Taos to a civilian? Anything goes. Artists, poets, freaks, snake handlers, outlaws, motorcycles, dropouts, drop-ins, gays, lesbians. Everybody is on a quest. Everybody is trying to find the center, said Dick. If youre a searcher, if youre an artist or poet, then Taos has an attraction that will grab you around your throat and not let go.

Dicks introduction to his section of the most recent case study talks about a zone in the creative process where time and space are broken. Artistic genius, he said, is determined by how long one can exist in that zone.

Ive talked to other creators and we all agree that if you, in your lifetime, can produce one or two great things, its at that point that youve jumped into madness, he said. Whats happening in that flow is that logic has dropped to the floor. Rationalism is gone. Youre dealing with ethereal, mystical things.

The artist first experienced this phenomenon several decades ago, while working with fellow artist and model, Andrea Paulette, whom Dick calls, a true muse. Dick worked with Paulette for several years, creating various paintings and photographs, and what he considers his best work a sculpture of Paulette created in a beer and aspirin-fueled haze.

Shed come in in the morning and take the pose, and Id work, said Dick. After seven days and seven nights, Im coming apart. She looked at me and she said, Whats wrong with you? And I said, I cant do any more. And she walked out of here and that was the last time I saw her.

Dick is very open with his mental health experiences, going into detail about his own struggles and personal experiences with depression.

While she was sitting there and I was working, I had gone over the edge, he continued. When that came to an end, I went into a depression. I went into a sulking, gloomy life. I didnt know what was wrong with me. I had given so much. I was empty.

Ultimately, Dick, unlike many other famous artists, was able to pull himself out of that darkness, encouraging him to work with Creativity and Madness to understand the root of these common experiences and symptoms and their links to the artistic world.

To this day, Dick hasnt parted with the piece he created with Paulette all those years ago.

Im proud of it, but at the same time Im not so sure I did it, he said. Some of my best things came from beyond. Is that madness? It may be.

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Kirkwood Artist Works with Psychology Group to Find Link Between Art and Science with Creativity and Madness - Catholic University of America The...

2021 has been a banner year on the reading front, though maybe not exactly the one Id expected. My little sons entrance into the world has sent me plumbing the depths of the Dr. Seuss and P.D. Eastman canons, breaking out the classic Berenstain Bears, and seeing how well I can nail the tongue-twisters of Fox in Socks. I cant wait until hes old enough for the Chronicles of Narnia, Beverly Cleary, Harry Potter, and so many others.

That being said, I managed to get a fair amount of personal reading done toodidnt quite hit the 200-book mark this year, but am looking to clock in around 180 volumes or so. Having less time for my own study has forced me to prioritize the stuff I really want to read, which has ended up being quite a good thing.

Ive already raved here about Sigrid Undsets amazing novel Kristin Lavransdatter, so lets consider that one a gimme. Here are ten of the other books I picked up this year that really made an impact.

The Decline of the West (Oswald Spengler)

Spenglers opus is a massive and genre-blurring interpretation of world history on the largest possible scale. In the simplest terms, his project amounts to a theory of the defining characteristics and life cycles of major world cultures, ranging from the Mesoamerican to the Babylonian to the Russian. In Spenglers account, great cultures are unified by the metaphysical world-pictures at their respective heartsfrom the Way of the Egyptians to the garden of the Chinese. As a culture ages, its denizens response to this world-picture inevitably shifts from religious awe toward rationalism, scientism, and decadence. Of course any work like this one is inherently daring and extravagant, and there are plenty of places where one can poke holes in Spenglers thesis, but I could hardly put this book down. This is what genius looks like.

Aspects of Truth: A New Religious Metaphysics (Catherine Pickstock)

Aspects of Truth, the latest volume from the grand doyenne of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, is a showstopping articulation and defense of the Christian philosophical tradition against virtually all assailantsfrom both the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy. In its depth and breadth, Aspects of Truth is to metaphysics what Alasdair MacIntyres Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity is to moral philosophy. This is decidedly not an entry-level work, and probably requires a graduate-level background in philosophical theology to really enjoy, but those with a taste for intellectual brio will find much to love here.

The Ecclesiastical Text: Criticism, Biblical Authority, and the Popular Mind (Theodore P. Letis)

In this essay collection, the late biblical scholar (and Lutheran theologian) Theodore Letis outlines a provocative argument that the Protestant quest for the original autographs of Scripture is misguided, conceding far too much to modernist methods. Instead, Letis contends that what matters is the ecclesiastical text handed down by the church through time (perhaps even including such allegedly later texts as the Johannine comma and the long ending of Mark)a stance that brought him into the strange company of KJV-onlyists. In so doing, Letis defends an understanding of sola scripturathat fully owns the fact that Bible exists in, with, and for the church. Regardless of your confessional allegiance, Letiss unconventional and surprisingly brilliant case deserves your attention.

Between Two Fires (Christopher Buehlman)

The only way I can describe this historical horror-thriller novel is something like Cormac McCarthys The Road mixed with Frank Perettis This Present Darkness, set during the Black Death. Its a high-testosterone rollercoaster of a book that manages to be spectacularly gruesome, theologically sophisticated, and deeply moving all at the same time.

Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (Thch Nht Hnh)

If, like me, your exposure to the Buddhist tradition has been mostly limited to fragments of pop culture, Thch Nht Hnhs intellectual biography of Siddhartha Gautama is the ideal entry point to further study. In easy, accessible prose, Old Path White Clouds outlines the early history and fundamental principles of Theravada Buddhism, explaining complex ideas that might otherwise seem alien to those of us with thoroughly Western worldviews. Yes, its 600 pages, but they fly by.

Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law (Chaim N. Saiman)

Ill freely admit that, over the years, I havent done much reading about the Jewish Tradition! that Fiddler on the Roofs Tevye defended so famouslymuch less the intricate legal lattice of reflections on the Torah that have developed within Jewish scholarship for millennia. Saimans study of halakhah, or Jewish law, is an accessible scholarly introduction to how these laws have emerged over time and how they actually work in practice. Saiman advances the compelling argument that debates over the most arcane points of lawcovering impossible situations that would never obtain in realityare, in a sense, religious devotions, discussions through which all things in the world can be seen to be ordered to God. A perfect read for the curious and legally-minded soul.

The Invention of Religion in Japan (Jason nanda Josephson Storm)

Josephson Storm delivers an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways in which the notoriously contentious concept of religionas a master category encompassing traditions as different as Christianity and Buddhismbecame embedded within a Japanese civilization that had no indigenous word for this concept. Most notable is this books exploration of the deliberate construction of a State Shinto ideology as a distinctively Japanese tool for navigating Westernized modernity. This required the development of a new theology drawing on Japanese folk traditions and coupling them with a new appreciation for Western science and industrializationeven to the point of reconceiving the afterlife as a mechanized fantasia rather than the traditional grassy fields. In short, Josephson Storms argument points toward the uncomfortable suggestion that attempts to repristinate cultural traditions in the face of hostile cross-pressures are inevitably transformations of those traditions. If you loved Charles Taylors A Secular Age and want to take things to the next level, this is the volume for you.

Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro)

Like everything Ishiguro writes, Klara and the Sun is a treasure. This latest novel tells, in the first person, the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend (semi-sentient robot) tasked with serving as companion to the sick human girl Josie. As a solar-powered automaton, Klara is dependent upon the sun for all thingsand comes to revere it as a god. And as Josies illness advances, it soon becomes clear that Klaras role may not be what she initially envisioned, forcing Klara to trust in powers beyond herself. Culminating in one of the best endings Ishiguro has ever penned, this book is a powerful journey through memory, identity, and the irresistible orientation of every rational creature towards the divine.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas S. Kuhn)

Kuhns groundbreaking volume is the sort of text that regularly makes its way onto college syllabi, but that nobody actually reads. At its core, its a thoughtful examination of the historical contingencies underlying what counts as science. Instead of reflecting a smooth progression from ignorance to knowledge, Kuhn argues, the history of science must depict a tradition riven by fundamental paradigm shifts that periodically change the game altogetherafter which scientists employ different methods in order to answer different questions. The implications of Kuhns thesis are far-reaching, especially once they really sink in; internalize Kuhn, and youll inevitably find yourself left uncomfortable by casual public appeals to what science tells us. (A worthy follow-up read is Bruno Latours We Have Never Been Modern.)

Before Auschwitz: What Christian Theology Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism (Paul R. Hinlicky)

In this tough-to-classify volume, Lutheran theologian Paul Hinlicky canvasses the historical scholarship on German Lutheran complicity with Hitlers Reich from an overtly theological perspective, asking tough questions about political quiescence, the metaphysics of Nazi theology, and the Christian Churchs relationship to historical antisemitism. While Hinlickys own constructive theological proposals are more suggestive than systematic, this isnt a downside; Before Auschwitz is a unique work of meta-history that is acutely conscious of the inevitable ways in which theological commitments (of any sort) shape historical analysis, and the book even points toward a decidedly postliberal Lutheran critique of modern liberal-capitalist society. Ill be returning to this one repeatedly in the years to come.

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Some honorable mentions would have to be Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America (David Hackett Fischer), Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir), and The Blazing World (Siri Hustvedt).

What are your favorite books from 2021? Please feel free to share in the comments!

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The Best Books I Read This Year (2021 Edition) - Patheos