The walls keep getting closer and closer and closer. Read Michelle Goldberg on the subject if you want to have nightmares for a week.

Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they’re simply responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. They say they’re the victims in the culture wars. But Christian nationalist ideologues don’t want equality, they want dominance.

Yes of course they say secularism is a religion. Secularism is a religion, science is a religion, ‘evolutionism’ is a religion, ‘Darwinism’ is a religion, atheism is a religion, humanism is a religion, naturalism is a religion, rationality is a religion, everything that doesn’t bow down and grovel before their benighted … Read the rest

And there arose a great noise in the land, and a whirling on the waters, and the people were sore afraid, or upset, or worried, or puzzled, or something. Why? Because of a movie, of course. What movie? you ask, all athirst to know. Well what movie do you think? The Rembrandt code, of course. No no, I know; the Renoir code. No no, I’m just playing silly buggers; the Kandinsky code. Oh all right, the Da Vinci Code. (A title which causes a faint electrical hum of irritation every time I hear or see it, because as any fule kno, Da Vinci is not Leonardo’s surname. It’s like titling a book and movie The Of Devonshire Code after the … Read the rest

Thought for the day. From Dave Hill at ‘Comment is Free’.

Why are some progressives turning against identity politics? After all, aren’t they the means for liberating the oppressed? In fact, they have always had their critics from the left. But Islamic terrorism has, I guess, provided a new and more public momentum. Awkward questions are being asked, not least on this site: how can liberals support assertions of Muslim identity when these include the subordination of women and hatred of gays? How can the anti-war left march hand-in-hand with hardline Islamists? Tricky issues. And I’m a bit conflicted about them. I’m wary of accidentally joining in with the dreary right-wing drone about “victim culture”, “multiculturalism” (whatever they think

This little aside in Scott McLemee’s column made me laugh.

For better and for worse, the American reception of contemporary French thought has often followed a script that frames everything in terms of generational shifts. Lately, that has usually meant baby-boomer narcissism – as if the youngsters of ‘68 don’t have enough cultural mirrors already. Someone like Bernard-Henri Lévy, the roving playboy philosopher, lends himself to such branding without reserve. Most of his thinking is adequately summed up by a thumbnail biography – something like, “BHL was a young Maoist radical in 1968, but then he denounced totalitarianism, and started wearing his shirts unbuttoned, and the French left has never recovered.” Nor are American academics altogether immune to such prepackaged