Today’s Satanists are not engaged in the worship of evil. What they are engaged in is a classical American exercise: civilizing something that was originally anything but civil.

Peter Berger will not post on his blog this week. He will celebrate the Christmas holiday. In fear of ACLU lawsuits, he will carefully restrict the celebration to spaces not supported by the taxpayers. The blog will resume in the New Year.

Wishing all readers of the blog a happy holiday, or non-holy day, as their faith or lack of faith may suggest.

– PLB

Is charismatic Christianity coming to Europe? Up until now, it didn’t seem likely. But events in the UK perhaps suggest otherwise.

Courts in the EU and the the US recently overturned spurious cases brought by secularists regarding displays of religious symbols on public property— two small victories for common sense against Kemalism run amok.

The British Catholic journal The Tablet (which I have found to be a reliable and balanced source for what goes on in the Roman world) carried a story in its November 23, 2013, issue by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt, its correspondent in Germany. Titled “Mueller vs. Marx: Clash of the Titans”, the story reports on a public […]

In its November 2013 issue Commentary magazine carried an article by Jonathan Tobin, “Loving us to Death: How America’s Embrace is Imperiling American Jewry”. The article takes off from the rather startling findings of A Portrait of Jewish Americans, a survey of the Pew Center for Research. The demographic decline in the number of Jews […]

On November 11, 2013, Religion News Service reprinted an Associated Press story by Gillian Flaccus on the development of “atheist mega-churches”. These have the rather revealing name “Sunday Assemblies” (perhaps an allusion to the Pentecostal Assemblies of God—in the hope of emulating the success of the latter?). The story described a recent gathering of this […]

As reported in The New York Times on November 1, 2013, a rather dramatic scene occurred in the Turkish parliament in Ankara on the day before. Four female members of the parliament took their seats wearing Muslim head scarfs. Mind you, this is the most moderate form of this type of religiously mandated garb; it […]

Conflicts over language have occurred periodically all through history—command of sacred languages marking priestly hierarchies, languages of conquerors imposed upon or submissively adopted by the conquered, language as symbolizing class differences. Even today language is at the center of important political conflicts: between Catalan and Castilian in Spain, Flemish and French in Belgium, in campaigns […]

Most human beings are not logicians. They muddle through life with beliefs and values that often do not hang together logically. I think that, basically, this is good news. Rigorously consistent doctrines, in politics as in religion, have a tendency to become murderous. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz (in his wonderful book The Labyrinth of […]