Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Standing Agape at the Burning Mountain of Best Intentions

JJ will probably get the point when I mention Updike's "The Coup". I don't recommend The Coup in general, written well after Johnny Boy had descended to NY puerilism, but it has one very good, short and sharp, moment. Read it, and you will know.

4 comments:

My Frontier Thesis said...

Good article by Ledeen. Yes, the world is in quite a weltschmer. Islam preserved Greek scripts and texts that would have otherwise been lost. They filtered back into Europe. Jihadists are not interested in this. Nationalists have a problem with it too.

Ledeen also addresses the problem of the West (specifically America) not even knowing their own origins, either in Enlightenment, Whig, Tory, or even Native American terms. Every other year or so there’s a class about the historical Jesus taught by the dept. of philosophy and religion at the secular UND. The Ancient Historian has also expressed an interest in organizing a class around that same topic. The problem with fundamentalist Christianity in this country is often associated with a lack of historical context -- people get real screwed up ideas about how the world works when they think in a-historical terms.

Should we synthesize Ledeen’s ideas about restructuring our academic curriculum to emphasize the religious texts of Western Civilization and provide the historical context in which they originated with Clay Jenkinson’s ideas about creating International Studies Universities that teach Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian; the history of the Islamic world, the meanings of the Koran, and the various flavors of Islam; and the history of European Colonialism in the mid-East?

Pepe, what do you think about this idea?

Mr roT said...

Enough liberal arts! Everyone should shut up and take engineering courses. The professoriate is so corrupted that their judgements about anything other than those in applied science are to be ignored.
Those that have no ideas about applied science should be made to pump gas (which mostly they already do), clean toilets (which would figuritively at least undo some of the harm they have already caused), or be exterminated.

Arelcao Akleos said...

You see, MFT, JJ only wishes the best for you

My Frontier Thesis said...

JJ, there's a ton of money to be made in philosophy these days. That's why I ordered the 27's with spinners.