the northampton seminar

What Israel can teach China

Gerald McDermott — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:30:54 +0000

China needs to learn to become a laboratory if it is to survive the environmental pollution, financial mismanagement, and social inequity that derive from being the world’s sweatshop. So how can our Chinese students become the creative talent that China needs? And what makes Israel so innovative?

Israel’s answer is, as always, short and simple: Ask questions.

These two words in fact represent the cultural chasm that divides Israel and China. As Start-Up Nation mentions, Israel lacks hierarchy and formality so that when we visited a public high school in Tel Aviv, we saw teachers interrupt the principal, and learned that Israelis consider “shyness” a learning disability. When I asked an Israeli 14-year-old girl how much homework she does at night, she responded with “Why are you asking me this question?”
http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2012/05/13/what-israel-can-teach-china/

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The Life of Bernard Lewis

Gerald McDermott — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:34:57 +0000

It is all too tempting to describe Bernard Lewis, the distinguished historian of the Islamic world, as venerable. Mr. Lewis, who turns 96 on May 31, seems to possess the aura of the sage. Even his harshest critics have sometimes seen him in this light. After Mr. Lewis published a devastating critique of Edward Said’s “Orientalism” in 1982 in the New York Review of Books, the injured author responded with a long, angry letter to the editor that mocked Mr. Lewis’s “veneer of omniscient tranquil authority.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304743704577380390207004120.html

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Judaism’s Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality

Gerald McDermott — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:13:01 +0000

Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.

http://catholiceducation.org/articles/homosexuality/ho0003.html

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Catholic Social Teaching and the Ryan Budget

Gerald McDermott — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:51:04 +0000

The mistake that some Catholic leaders made in 1995 and 1996 is the same mistake some seem to be making today, which is to equate more federal spending on programs for the poor with the morally superlative approach from the perspective of Catholic social teaching.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/05/5388?utm_source=RTA+Berg-Capretta+Budget&utm_campaign=email&utm_medium=email

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A quick and dirty guide to why we should reject gay marriage

Gerald McDermott — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:34:08 +0000

Gerald McDermott

Why should we be opposed to same-sex marriage as long as we don’t permit it in our churches?

We already have clear biblical reasons for not allowing same-sex marriage in our churches. But what about out in the public square, where we cannot argue from the Bible? Does gay marriage affect our own marriages?

There actually are good reasons–using rational arguments apart from the Bible–for opposing same-sex marriage in society as a whole.

In short, gay marriage is not for the public good. It is not good for children. The best social science has shown us repeatedly that, all other things being equal, children need both a mother and a father for human flourishing. Gay marriage deprives children of having those two different kinds of influence—mothering and fathering.

Besides, the law has teaching value. When the government officially endorses gay marriage, it says children do not need both a mother and father for human flourishing. It departs from the common consensus of nearly every culture in the last three millennia that marriage is about procreation primarily and that children do best when raised by both a mother and father.

It also reinforces the idea that marriage is only an emotional union—which will increase marital instability because emotions are fickle.

Finally, gay marriage opens the door to polygamy and polyamory (marriage of three or more). There are people favoring both of these kinds of unions waiting to be accepted and protected by law. If gay marriage is protected, polygamy and polyamory will be protected as well. There is no philosophical or legal way to stop either, once marriage is redefined as based on love alone and not designed to raise children—which is how acceptance of gay marriage will indeed redefine marriage.

So government recognition of gay marriage may not affect our marriages immediately or directly, but over the course of time will lead people to think that marriage has nothing intrinsically to do with children, and that children do not need mothering and fathering both. Government recognition will also suggest strongly that marriage is about feelings and not the nurture of the next generation. Children and society both will suffer from these changed understandings.

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US conservatives are living on a different planet

Gerald McDermott — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:28:38 +0000

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO
A nauseating remark by Donald Trump on Fox News about Germany this week has confirmed my suspicion that today’s American and European conservatives are living on different planets. Discussing the Euro crisis on Greta van Susteren’s “On the Record” show, Trump said: “Germany is trying to take over the world economically; they weren’t able to do it militarily.
>>>
>>> Now, before I let off steam about this claptrap, let me disclose this much about myself: I am a solid conservative of the European stripe. If I were a US citizen, I could never vote for “pro choice” candidates or those favoring same-sex marriage. Like American conservatives, I want governments to be small and taxes low. I oppose the nanny state and entitlements, support free enterprise, hard work and responsible lifestyles. I am a conservative because I want to “conserve,” in the original Latin sense of the word, the Christian civilization we inherited including its religious, educational and cultural treasures, its civility and good manners.
>>>
>>> But there are differences: I do not consider myself depraved because I like fast trains and speak foreign languages, and I see no merit in ethnic or national bigotry, including the gratuitous chauvinism inherent in the term, “exceptionalism;” I have learned in my childhood in Germany where this kind of thinking can lead. And so I feel politically homeless in contemporary America, a country I love; I despise the mindlessness reflected in Mr. Trump’s glib statement, which is emblematic of the discourse in the type of electronic media where he is seen and heard. Is this conservative? Not in my book. It is unintelligent and inelegant, two adjectives I do not associate with the grace of real conservative thought.
>>>
>>> Mr. Trump seems clueless about the distasteful company he is keeping by trumpeting out this ugly cliché before millions of Fox News spectators: the company of Greek anarchists, neo-Nazis and Communists burning German flags in the street of Athens and caricaturing Chancellor Angela Merkel as a brown-shirted, swastika-toting fiend, or advocates of irresponsible inflationary policies of the very type Fox News pretends to be fighting in America. In his genuinely postmodern inability to think in proper analogies, it did not occur to Trump that Germans abhor this behavior, just as Americans loathed morons burning their national flag and spelling the name of their country Ameri-kkk-a in the 1960s.
>>>
>>> O, now I get it! Perhaps in Trump’s mind solidarity is a leftist term. It’s not something conservatives do to each other, at least not from the perspective of the kind of conservatives we are discussing here, the “me”-conservatives unbound by codes of honor worth conserving, just as the rest of the “Me” culture.
>>>
>>> What exactly is it that Trump, in line with European leftists and extremists, dislikes about today’s Germans? I say today’s Germans, those 99 percent of us who weren’t even born when Hitler came to power. He admits that Germans have done “unbelievably well,” and he surely cannot claim that they have accomplished this by force of arms or knavish tricks. I posit that they reaped the fruits of doing what Germans always do best: hard work, precision engineering, making beautiful products of the highest quality that sell well around the world, maintaining sound labor relations, training their workers superbly, and exercising fiscal responsibility. How dare Mr. Trump mention this commendable behavior in the same breath with shameful deeds a criminal regime has committed before he was even born!
>>>
>>> Or is it that in his mind only Americans are virtuous when they work hard and well and behave prudently, whereas Germans doing the very same thing are by definition Nazis light? What must Germans do to receive Trump’s approbation? Become sloppy? Go on strike? Produce rubbish in order for others to get a larger share of the market? Should they have followed the American example, much bemoaned by Trump and his fellow Fox commentators, of destroying their own economy?
>>>
>>> Trump’s insult to Western Europe’s most populous nation could be dismissed as crude drivel if it were not one rare item of information about Germany broadcast by America’s premier “conservative” cable network, which is too mean to base foreign correspondents in continental capitals and apparently too hick to cover Western Europe instead of badmouthing it almost daily. I will never forget thigh-slapping the hilarity in a Fox talk show when a panelist proclaimed a few years ago: “The only trouble with Europe is that it has too many Europeans.” By God, this was unadulterated Nazi diction! I am pleased to say that in Germany this kind of rhetoric would be treated as a hate crime.
>>>
>>> As a journalist who has learned his craft with the Associated Press, I am disconsolate that for my evening news I must go to Al Jazeera, compliments of PBS, if I want to avoid networks whose liberal slant I find objectionable. Why don’t conservative billionaires like Donald Trump see a need to invest in a restoration of genuinely “fair and balanced” journalism in this country that used to be the international leader in high media standards? For democracy to survive, we need more facts to reach the electorate, not more half-baked opinions posing as “conservative.”
>>>
>>> Contrary to what Fox’s smug talk show hosts will have you believe, the frightening collapse of journalistic standards is by no means an exclusively left-wing phenomenon. The so-called conservative media outlets are no better. Fox’s listeners don’t know that Germany, the world’s second largest exporter, maintains the third-largest NATO contingent in Afghanistan, after the US and the United Kingdom, and that German soldiers are also dying in the Hindukush. Never do the journalistic poseurs talking over their interview partners in prime time offer a detailed report of a compelling international saga that is as much a human interest as a political story: Whether you like Germans or not, the Herculean act of one middle-aged woman, Angela Merkel, carrying the rest of Europe is a unique event in the history of Western civilization, especially if you consider that Germany has just had to spend nearly €2 trillion ($2,7 trillion) to repair the disastrous damage 40 years of Communist have done to its eastern territories. But to understand this you have to know history.
>>>
>>> When discussing health care, these pundits ridicule the British and Canadian systems but never mention Germany’s, which is the world’s oldest, having been started by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883 in order to stave off socialist alternatives. It is really irrelevant whether this omission is due to prejudice or ignorance; the consequence is the same: these “journalists” keep their public ill-informed at a time when international perils call for well-educated voters.
>>>
>>> Donald Trump said, “Germany is trying to help Germany.” So? He complained that the euro was not created “for the betterment of the United States.” So? He also claimed that the whole European project was directed against US. No! It was created by very wise men to forestall another bloody fratricide in the Old World. Mr. Trump should be thankful that he has never experienced what this was like. I am ten years older; I have lived through it, which is why I don’t long for a repetition. European wars have never been good for Americans either. Mr. Trump should have thought of that, but he hasn’t.
>>>
>>> Moreover, it seems illogical for a champion of free enterprise to view the competitive intentions of the European Union as detrimental to the United States, as Trump insinuated in his interview with Greta van Susteren. Have I missed a class at school? Is not competition what free enterprise is all about? Why should peaceful competition be fine on a national but not on an international level, as long as both sides subscribe to the same principles of freedom?
>>>
>>> I would not have lowered myself to venting my anger here about the utterances of a buffoon had 55 years in international journalism not taught me to appraise most somberly the state of the world we are living in. This knowledge leaves me in no doubt that that we cannot afford to indulge in narrow “exceptionalist“ dreams. American and Continental conservatives need each other today more than ever; but I mean real conservatives determined to conserve our civilization, including hard work, fiscal discipline, entrepreneurship, a commitment to the sanctity of human life and, yes, civility, which I found lacking in Donald Trump’s superfluous remarks.
>>>
>>> Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

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Obama, Romney, and gay marriage

Gerald McDermott — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:43:37 +0000

The president will now wage an all-out campaign of calling Mitt Romney an “anti-gay” bigot for opposing what he himself would not embrace until five minutes ago. But given the track record of victories for the defense of marriage in thirty-one states, and the still-tentative declaration of the president, it is clear that he knows he is running a risky strategy. What he knows, we should know too. And we should know that if we keep our heads, and don’t buy into the “anti-gay” framing of the liberal establishment, we are strong enough to win the fight for the truth about marriage.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/05/5395?utm_source=RTA+Franck+Obama+Marriage&utm_campaign=email&utm_medium=email

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The Budget and Religion: Principles for Informing Policy

Gerald McDermott — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:55:25 +0000

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R–WI) is being criticized by the secular and religious left for comments he made about the role his Catholic faith played in crafting his budget. The most outrageous criticism is that it played any role at all.

The reactions to Ryan’s comments should call to mind three important things: (1) religious values should be welcomed in the public square, (2) not all religious values are based on divine revelation, and (3) translating moral principles into policy requires both prudence and technical expertise
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/05/the-budget-religion-and-faith-principles-for-informing-policy?utm_source=RTA+marriage+budget&utm_campaign=email&utm_medium=email

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Evangelicals and the Coming Romney Victory

Gerald McDermott — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:58:30 +0000

A new poll from Virginia, a key swing state, suggests that evangelicals will help put Mitt Romney in the White House this November.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/05/evangelicals-and-the-coming-romney-victory

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Where’s the outcry over Palestinian censorship?

Gerald McDermott — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:48:45 +0000

A university lecturer and single mother of two, Ismat Abdul-Khaleq, was arrested in the West Bank last week for criticizing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Facebook. Perhaps this is what Abbas meant when he said during a recent interview with al-Jazeera that his party, Fatah, was a political and ideological copy of the terrorist group Hamas. His words: “In all honesty, there are no disagreements between us.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/silence-on-palestinian-censorship/2012/04/05/gIQAZ3khxS_story.html

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