Book: “God’s Continent,” Philip Jenkins

• “Though ancient churches stand as visible monuments, defining the landscape of cities and villages, most have lost their traditional role as thriving centers of community. At least in its institutional form, and that is an important distinction, European Christianity seems to be terminally ill.”
• “In some Muslim nations, around 90 percent declare that religion “plays a very important role” in their lives, while the U.S. figure in 2002 was about 60 percent. The average figure for Europeans was 21 percent, though of course with national variations…Between 1973 and 1994, the proportion of French people claiming no religion grew from 11 percent to 34 percent.”
• “German sociologist Ulrich Beck notes…’there is a rough rule of thumb according to which the closer one gets to the Pope, the fewer children one has.’”
• “The clearest example of institutional implosion is Ireland, which as recently the 1970s enjoyed the highest level of religious practice in Europe: 85 percent to 90 percent of Catholics regularly attended Sunday mass.”
• John Bruton, former Irish PM, calls the attitude towards religion in the EU “a form of secular intolerance in Europe that is every bit as strong as religious intolerance of the past.”
• “The steady march of gay marriage laws suggests a near collapse of the political power of the churches, though such changes have not occurred without fervent efforts at resistance. In Ireland as recently as 1995, a referendum on the question of legalizing divorce still showed 49.72 percent opposed to even this reform.”
• “While few advocate prohibition, many secular commentators agree that drink culture in Britain has become uncontrollable and dangerous, a serious incentive to violence and sexual assault, and that much greater restraint is needed. Yet the Anglican church has not spoken powerfully on the issue, largely because it does not want to be seen interfering in personal morality. Historically, such reticence is very new, and it could well fade if and when Christians and Muslims do make common cause.”
• “Death and resurrection are not just fundamental doctrines of Christianity; they represent a historical model of the religion’s structure and development.”

Books: "The Numerati," Stephen Baker, and "The Gun Seller," Hugh Laurie

“The Numerati,” Stephen Baker

• "Turning us into simple numbers was what happened in the industrial age. That was yesterday’s story…We’re witnessing (as well as experiencing) the mathematical modeling of humanity. It promises to be one of the great undertakings of the twenty-first century."


• "A Carnegie Mellon University study recently showed that simply by disclosing gender, birth date, and postal zip code, 87 percent of people in the United States could be pinpointed by name."

“The Gun Seller,” Hugh Laurie

• "'We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat corn flakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words a little more carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men don’t have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’
  ‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.
  ‘That, of course, is the other main difference.'"

Book: "Persepolis," Marjane Satrapi.

If you're home on break looking for something to do, read this book. I dislike the word "gripping" when used in reviews, but I didn't want to do anything else once I started reading this autobiographical graphic novel. I only have a very small sample to show you, but hopefully it will pique your interest as it did mine:

Book: "The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart," Bill Bishop

• “In 1976, less than a quarter of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a landslide. By 2004, nearly half of all voters lived in landslide counties.”
• “The Big Sort, then, is not simply about political partisanship, about how Americans vote every couple of years. It is a division in what they value, in how they worship, and in what they expect out of life.”
• “The old systems of order – around land, family, class, tradition, and religious denomination – gave way. They were replaced over the next thirty years with a new order based on individual choice. Today we seek our own kind in like-minded churches, like-minded neighborhoods, and like-minded sources of news and entertainment.”
• “Unsurpassed prosperity had set people free – free to think, speak, move, and drift. Unsurpassed prosperity had enriched Americans – and it had loosened long-established social moorings.”
• “The more educated American become – and the richer – the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view, [Diana] Mutz wrote [in “Hearing the Other Side.”]
• “We have migrated into ever-narrower communities and churches and political groups…We have replaced a belief in a nation with a trust in ourselves and our carefully chosen surroundings…In thts time, we have reshaped our economies, transformed our businesses, both created and decimated our cities, and altered institutions of faith and fellowship that have withstood centuries. Now more isolated than ever in our private lives cocooned with our fellows, we approach public life the sensibility of customers who are always right. “Tailor-made” has worked so well for industry and social networking sites, for subdivisions and churches, we expect it from our government too. But democracy doesn’t seem to work that way.”
• “In 1976, the average winning margin in the 50 states and Washington, DC, was 10 percentage points…In 2008, the average winning margin…was 17.4 percentage points.”

Book: "American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile," Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

• “[T]he Catholic Church is not above the fray, but neither is she captive to the fray. Her chief political contribution is to provide a transcendent horizon for our civil arguments, to temper the passionate confusions of the political penultimate with the theological ultimate, and to insist that our common humanity and gift of reason are capable of deliberating how we ought to order our life together."
• “In the view of [Alasdair] MacIntyre and other, the Enlightenment project has failed on its own terms…[I]t failed to produce an ethics to which any rational person, acting rationally, must give assent. Society was for a time able to live off the capital of earlier traditions of virtue, but now that capital has been depleted, the failure of the Enlightenment project has been widely advertised, and the time has come round at last for the triumph of nihilism.”
• “The new barbarians are not barbarians because they are unsophisticated but precisely because of the hyper-sophistication with which they have removed themselves from what I have called the civilizational circle of moral conversation. In simpler terms, we may speak of “traditional values.” The barbarians refuse to be limited by what we know, by the wisdom we have received, about good and evil, right and wrong. From them, the past is merely prelude.”
• “It is true that the Constitution establishes a secular order of government…To say that this government is secular is to say that it is for the present time; it is a temporal order. It is for the city of man, not the City of God. The American founders did not establish this constitutional order to be a church, although for some secularists it may be the closest thing they have to a church.”
• “There is considerable truth in the observation that politics is primarily a function of culture, that at the heart of culture is morality, and that at the heart of morality are those commanding truths typically associated with religion…Unless tempered by the virtue of civility, the metaphor of “culture wars,” in which commanding truths are pitted against each other, can easily lead to a circumstance in which politics degenerates into warfare that is not merely metaphorical…which in America means not warfare between religions but between opposing visions of the common good prosecuted with religious fervor, with one side unfurling its battle banners against ‘theocracy,’ and the other against ‘the dictatorship of relativism.’”
• “It would seem obvious that the human good is served by respect for human dignity. But this obviously is not obvious to all. The argument is sharpened if we speak not of human dignity but of the dignity of the human person. The phrase human dignity may suggest the human collective and include efforts such as taking technological charge of the evolution of the human species. The dignity of the human person places the accent on the individual – although, to be sure, the individual situated in society, and one hopes, in society that aspires to being community.”
• Re: Human Dignity. “In a world indelibly marked and marred by the Holocaust, the Gulag Archipelago, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and myriad other crimes against humanity, a political consensus as a placeholder against great veils, no matter how intellectually rickety its structure, is not to be scorned."
• “In a world that continues to be dominated by libido dominandi – the unbridled lust for power and glory – politics is an instrument for the restrain of great evil.”
• “A human being is a person possessed of a dignity we are obliged to respect at every point of development, debilitation or decline by virtue of being created in the image and likeness of God. Endowed with the spiritual principle of the soul, with reason and with free will, the destiny of the person who acts in accord with moral conscience in obedience to the truth is nothing less than eternal union with God. This is the dignity of the human person that is to be respected defended and indeed revered.”
• “Optimism is not a virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don’t want to see. Optimism is not a virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don't want to see. Hope is only hope when it is hope with eyes wide open to all that challenges hope."
• “Despite all, we cling to the belief that we are unique persons, acting and hoping and aspiring in ways that have consequence, maybe even eternal consequence. That belief is mocked by the elemental forces of determinism, and mocked unanswerably, or so it seems to many, by the reality of death. Posited against death’s edict of ultimate meaninglessness, we unfurl the banner of hope for “eternal life”…Eternal life is not this life continuing without end. Eternal life is the fulfillment anticipated by all that is good, true and beautiful in this life.”
• “We must not think that the totalitarian catastrophes of that unhappy century are safely consigned to the past. The utopian impulse is deeply embedded in the human heart, and we can be sure that there is today a counterpart to Karl Marx working away in the British Library, or, more likely, in some biotech laboratory, contriving a plan for the reaction of a home in history that will satisfy our longing for home.”
• “As Christians and as Americans, in this our awkward duality of citizenship, we seek to be faithful in a time not of our choosing but of our testing. We resist the hubris of presuming that it is the definitive time and place of historical promise or tragedy, but it is our time and place. It is a time of many times: a time for dancing, even if to the songs of Zion in a foreign land; a time for walking together, unintimidated when we seem to be a small and beleaguered band; a time for rejoicing in momentary triumphs, and for defiance in momentary defeat; a time for persistence in reasoned argument, never tiring in proposing to the world a more excellent way; a time for generosity toward those who would make us their enemy; and, finally, a time for happy surrender to brother death – but not before, through our laughter and tears, we see and hail from afar the New Jerusalem and know that it is all time toward home.”
  

Book: "The Post-American World," Fareed Zakaria

• “Hyperinflation is the worst economic malady that can befall a nation…It was no the Great Depression that brought the Nazis to power in Germany but rather hyperinflation, which destroyed the middle class by making its savings worthless.”
• “In Washington [D.C.,] new thinking about a new world is sorely lacking…both parties continue to speak in language entirely designed for a domestic audience with no concern for the poisonous effect it has everywhere else. American politicians constantly and promiscuously demand, label, santion,and condemn whole countries for myriad failings…We are the only country in the world to issue annual report cards on every other country’s behavior. Washington, D.C., has become a bubble, smug and out of touch with the world outside.”
• “Between 1350 and 1950 – six hundred years – GDP per capita remained roughly constant in China and India (hovering around $600 for China and $550 for India.) In the same period, Western European GDP per capita went from $662 to $4,594, a 594 percent increase.” (emphasis his)
• “The world we’re entering will look like Bollywood. It will be thoroughly modern – and thus powerfully shaped by the West – but it will also retain important elements of local culture…The real effect of globalization has been an efflorescence of the local and modern.”
• “Immigration also gives America a quality rare for a rich country – hunger and energy…[I]mmigrants have gone on to become the backbone of the American working class, and their children or grandchildren have entered the American mainstream. America has been able to tap this energy, manage diversity, assimilate newcomers, and move ahead economically. Ultimately, this is what sets the country apart from the experience of Britain and all other historical examples of great economic powers that grow fat and lazy and slip behind as they face the rise of leaner, hungrier nations.”
• “America is the only country in the world, other than Liberia and Myanmar, that is not on the metric system…The entire British government works aggressively to make London a global hub. Washington, by contrast, spends its time and energy thinking of ways to tax New York, so that it can send its revenues to the rest of the country.”
• “For most of the world, the Iraq War was not about Iraq. ‘What does Mexico or Chile care about who rules in Baghdad?’ Jorge Castaneda, the former foreign minister of Mexico, told me. ‘It was about how the world’s superpower wields its power. That’s something we all care deeply about.”
• “Some 13 percent of U.S. Muslims believe that suicide bombings can be justified. Too high, for sure, but the figure compares with 42 percent for French Muslims and 88 percent for Jordanians.”

Book: “How We Got Here – The 70s: The Decades That Brought You Modern Life – For Better or Worse"

Quotes that struck me from "How We Got Here – The 70s: The Decades That Brought You Modern Life – For Better or Worse,” by David Frum, resident scholar at AEI and former Bush43 speechwriter.

• “The social transformation of the 1970s was real and was permanent. It left behind a country that was more dynamic, more competitive, more tolerant; less deferential, less self-confident, less united; more socially-equal, less economically equal; more expressive, more risk-averse, more sexual; less literate, less polite, less reticent.”
• “37 million American – meaning one household out of four – had suffered a rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny or auto theft in 1973. In cities of more than 100,000 population, the victimization rate was one household out of every three.”
• [Eisenstadt v. Baird] “Every era tacitly places one liberty ahead of all others; one that must always prevail when values conflict. For late 18th-century Americans, that liberty was freedom of religion. For late 19th-century Americans, it was the right to own and dispose of property. For the 20th-century Americans it was sexual freedom.”
• “The 1879 Connecticut statue overturned by Griswold had not been enforced in decades. The birth-control pill appeared on the market in 1961, a decade before the birth rate plunged. It was women’s preferences, not contraceptive techniques, that changed in the 1970s. The women of the 1970s wanted small families – often, they wanted no family at all.”
• “The dumbing down of the curriculum was encouraged by changes within the teaching progression. The 1970s were the decade in which teaching was transformed from a low-paying, relatively prestigious profession to a relatively well-paid, unprestigious occupation.”
• “What divides left-wing social activism from traditionalist is the locus of the sin to be stamped out. The left has usually been drawn to collective problem (segregation, poverty, sexism, the war in Vietnam); the traditionalists, to individual vices and weakness (drunkenness, drug addiction, abortion.)”
• “More than two-thirds of the women who turned eighteen between the end of the Korean War and the Kennedy inauguration acknowledged sleeping with only one man as of their thirtieth birthday – their fiancé or husband, presumably. Only 2 percent of the women who turned eighteen between 1971 and 1980 could say the same thing on their thirtieth birthdays.”
• “If nonmarital sex between consenting adults was okay, as a majority of American was coming to believe, how did it become wrong if those adults happened both to be women or both to be men?”
• “It is telling that of the thirty-five states that ultimately ratified the ERA, twenty-two did so in the ten months before Roe v. Wade, and only thirteen in the ten years after.”
• “Between 1972 and 1980, the proportion of Americans who…paid attention to public affairs “most of the time” dropped from 36 percent to 26 percent…But was it really so surprising? For a decade, power had been massively and systematically transferred from the elective branches of government, where it could be controlled, to no-elective branches, where it could not…Was it surprising that a country whose government had decided to treat its people like subjects should find that those same people no longer felt themselves to be citizens?”
• “In 1980, there were 27 million poor people in America, or about 12.4 percent of the population, approximately the same proportion as in 1965. The level of poverty [after LBJ’s “Great Society” efforts] in the United States had not much changed over those fifteen years, but its character had. Poverty, before 1960 mostly rural and white, became urban and nonwhite. Almost 70 percent of America’s poor lived in metropolitan areas in 1980.”
• “[After the 70s,] Americans were not retuning to the era of laissez faire. Rugged individualism no longer swayed them, Neither, however, did the social-democratic ethos of the middle years of the century. Americans were moving on to something new, a creed that blended the antique ideal of self-reliance with a soft sense of entitlement for those who made some minimal effort on their own behalf,. It was a fuzzy political idea – perfect for the fuzzy era to come – and the struggle to imbue it with meaning would define the politics of the post-Cold War era.”
• “The parents’ myth [of the “Greatest Generation”] is much more appealing than the other: Who would not be prouder of having fought through he mud of Guadalcanal than having fornicated in the mud at Woodstock? But…it is as foolish to idealize the past as to condescend to it…Like them or loathe them, the middle decades of the twentieth century were an entirely anomalous period in American history. Never had the state been so strong, ever had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the county been more economically equal, never had it bee more ethically homogenous, seldom was its political consensus more overpowering.”
• “The Vietnam war did not merely discredit the government that chose to wage it; it discredited the habits of mind that made the war possible; it discredited the very style and sensibility of mid-century America, from Bob Hope’s entertainment of the troops to the coats and ties in college dining lounges. It taught an entire generation the oppositional style that to this day so often substitutes for real politics.

I like to worry about the future.

I've been meaning to post this Slate article from October for a while on Prenatal tests, genetics, and abortion by William Saletan, of whom I'm not a huge fan. I keep telling myself I'm going to update my ND Web site and put my bioperfectionism essay up there for some bed time reading, and that will be announced when it's ready...The convalescence period after my wisdom teeth extraction today may help towards that goal.

Speaking of the pursuit of technological utopia, I'm reading We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which is generally regarded as the one of the trio of dystopias written in the first half of the Twentieth Century along with Brave New World and 1984. My favorite is still BNW, and so far We is coming in a close third. They're all interesting for each author's take on what he thought the best avenue to curtail freedom - Zamyatin is similar to Huxley in a view of a government taking power by eliminating the link between sex and reproduction and emptying it of any meaning. But we're not anywhere near that, are we?

While recovering, I'm watching South Carolina-Kentucky in the Liberty Bowl on ESPN360.com and for halftime they're doing a human interest on Georgia Head Coach Mark Richt who felt called by God to adopt a girl named Anya from Ukraine who suffers from a facial deformity called Proteus syndrome. In the documentary, she tells the ESPN reporter that "It doesn't matter what you look like on the outside, it's matter your heart is like on the inside." ....Amen. "For you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the children."