Here and There ...

• Peter Sean Bradley (Lex Communis) reviews Susanna Heschel's The Aryan Jesus:

  [I]nsofar as the Nazis were Christian, their Christianity was essentially a heretical version of Christianity that would have been unrecognizable in its Marcion-like willingness to amputate such "Jewish" aspects of Christianity as the Old Testament. Heschel's book offers a nuts and bolts view of how that amputation took place under the Nazi regime. ...

• Natural Law, Natural Rights and American Constitutionalism - brought to you by the Witherspoon Institute, "to create an online archive containing the seminal documents of these traditions with educational resources" -- made possible through the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and with direction from scholars associated with the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

• Jake Tawney (Roma Locuta Est): "The Problems with Facebook":

  My aim is not to discuss the overt misuses of Facebook. These are obvious enough to most. Instead, my aim is to disclose the subtle philosophical formation that can occur by using Facebook, particularly if we are not properly grounded in a Christian personalism.

  The irony of promoting this article not only through a blog but also specifically through Facebook has not escaped me. ...

• Fr. Regis Scanlon: Did Vatican II reverse the Church’s teaching on religious liberty? (Homiletic and Pastoral Review):

  Since the close of the Second Vatican Council, many heterodox theologians have claimed that Dignitatis Humanae “reversed” past papal teaching on religious liberty.3 In 1985, for example, the excommunicated Archbishop Lefebvre claimed that Quanta Cura “condemned” an “assertion” which was later found in the Vatican II document, Dignitatis Humanae.4 But other “progressive” theologians like Charles Curran and Richard McBrien also saw, and welcomed, an utter reversal of Catholic teaching.5 So, on this point both the excessively “conservative” and “liberal” meet, but what are the “centrally” orthodox to make of the Church’s current teaching on religious liberty?

• Stuart Buck: "C.S. Lewis on 16th Century English":

  I've been slogging my way through C.S. Lewis's book English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, which is the only Lewis book that I haven't yet managed to read. It's been slow going, and I now understand why Lewis sarcastically referred to the book as OHEL (i.e., the Oxford History of English Literature), pronounced "O Hell." ...

• Michael J. Totten -- one journalist whose reporting on Middle East affairs I've come to value -- asserts:

  "Now is an excellent time to take a fresh look at the interview I conducted with Paul Berman last year about his newest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals which focuses on Tariq Ramadan, the false-moderate grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna."

• Deacon Greg Kandra shares his impressions of the new exorcist film, "The Rite":

  ... the real point of the story isn’t the devilish doings – frogs materialize mysteriously at one point, too – but something much more compelling, and infinitely more absorbing: the battle between doubt and faith. The young seminarian’s journey from unbelief to belief, and finally to certainty, struck me as credible and, ultimately, moving. It’s rare that you see a young religious depicted sympathetically on screen these days, so it was gratifying to watch a lukewarm vocation heat up and boil over – and the movie’s conclusion, in a confessional, struck just the right tone. Sin happens. And it’s not always accompanied by bellowing voices from hell.

  “Faith becomes you,” the old priest says to his young protégé near the end. That may well be the movie’s moral right there – and one many of us need to hear, no matter how much we believe, or how much we don’t.