Here and There

• Father Mitch Pacwa of EWTN interviews Archbishop Raymond Burke, previously Archbishop of St. Louis (2003–2008) and Bishop of La Crosse (1995–2003) and appointed Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura -- a position roughly equivalent to that of Chief Justice of the United States. Burke is also the second-highest ranking American prelate at the Vatican after William Cardinal Levada, who took Pope Benedict's place as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

• Steven McGuire of the Lehrman American Studies Center interviews J. Budziszewski, author of The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction. See also Budzisewski's March 2010 interview with Carl Olson on the scandal of natural law and "Objections, Obstacles, Acceptance", about his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism. (HT: Insight Scoop).

• David P. Goldman (aka Spengler) on "the Heideggar puzzle" -- "The recent publication of transcripts of Martin Heidegger’s 1934 Freiburg seminars on Being, the People and the State simply adds to the confusion over the philosopher’s relationship to Nazism."

  Further reading: Nazi or Philosopher? (Claremont Review of Books Spring 2010), by Steven B. Smith. Both responding to Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 Yale University Press (November 2009).

• Why Christianity Is "Foreign" to Japan: Annihilation of the "self," divinization of nature, rejection of a personal God. The cornerstones of the Japanese culture, explained by Kagefumi Ueno, the ambassador of the Rising Sun to the Holy See. (Sandro Magister, August 19, 2010).

• Ray Bradbury at 90 - James E. Person Jr. (National Review):

  “The thing that drives me most often is an immense gratitude that I was given this one chance to live, to be alive the one time round in a miraculous experience that never ceases to be glorious and dismaying,” he wrote to his friend Russell Kirk many years ago. He added: “I accept the whole damn thing. It is neither all beautiful nor all terrible, but a wash of multitudinous despairs and exhilarations about which we know nothing. Our history is so small, our experience so limited, our science so inadequate, our theologies so crammed in mere matchboxes, that we know we stand on the outer edge of a beginning and our greatest history lies before us, frightening and lovely, much darkness and much light.”