I've been remiss is not linking to Joe Knippenberg's piece on an important federal court decision on religious freedom. Give it a read. Also read Jospeh Bottum discussing the tough life in Fall River County, South Dakota.
Speaking of South Dakota, Ramesh Ponnuru discusses the new abortion regulations.
Prof. Blanchard blogged on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who holds the record for the hardest last name to spell (you can look it up!). The New York Times obit is well worth the read as is Jay Nordlinger's excellent discussion of Solzhenitsyn's controversial Harvard commencement address from 1978. Solzhenitsyn, it seems to me, taught at least one powerful lesson: in order to speak truth to power one must believe in truth. In his view Soviet Russia was a brutal power and the West had ceased to believe in a counter-truth with which to oppose that brutality. Prof. Blanchard says Solzhenitsyn was anti-modern. That is probably true. But unless modernity is a utopia (and by definition no place is a utopia), then modernity contains certain errors, perhaps some false views on the human condition. Solzhenitsyn seemed to argue that a dedication to self-interest and commodious living may cause the West to concentrate on mere life at the expense of the good life and in that sense was anti-human (humanity being meant for the good life). There may be some truth to that claim. But, to be sure, Solzhenitsyn also fell prey to the error of the Eastern church, which is a kind of state worship. The Eastern Christian church early on aligned itself with the state, something that the Roman church never really did. While not precisely being a theocracy, the Russian Orthodox church in particular has historically apologized for authoritarian state power in ways one would not find in the West.
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