Koizumi was not rooted in Japan's rightwing nationalist tradition: he was a pragmatist and a populist. Abe, in contrast, is a rightwing nationalist. Unlike Koizumi, for example, he has questioned the validity of the postwar Tokyo trials of Japan's wa...
I have absolutely no regret about my vote against this war. The same questions remain. The cost in human lives, the cost to our budget, probably 100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less.
George Bush, Dick Cheney, every one of the speakers praised John Kerry's war record. No one said he was unfit. They said he has terrible judgment, and that's his record as a senator. Nobody questioned his military record.
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
During the Vietnam era, more than 30,000 draft dodgers and deserters sought harbor in cities like Montreal and Toronto, where public opposition to the war was strong and most residents didn't question their motives.
What was true of an ancient community of Christian believers struggling with a powerful and appealing philosophy is also true for Christians in a postmodern context. Arguments that deconstruct the regimes of truth at work in the late modern culture o...
We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider eve...
When society was patriarchal, as it was in the New Testament context and as it has been everywhere in the world except in modern society in our day, the church avoided scandal by going along with it - fundamentally evil as patriarchy was and is. Now,...
my advice is; Let’s join the caravan of humanity, and ally ourselves with a conscious progress, let’s join the secular non-sectarian societies, lets distant ourselves from military tradition, and join the human race in benefiting humanity as a wh...
Now if BECOMING history is the particularity of the Son in the economy, what is the contribution of the Spirit? Well, precisely the opposite: it is to liberate the Son and the economy from the bondage of history. If the Son dies on the cross, thus su...
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy...
These estimates may well be enhanced by one from F. Klein (1849-1925), the leading German mathematician of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 'Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.' ... If mathematics is...
A "positive, open consciousness" means looking at something as it is, without coating it in your own ideas or emotions and, furthermore, looking for hope and potential I in it. Thus, when you consciousness is open, you can communicate easily with ano...
Every human relationship begins with a coincidence. Even the most fundamental relationship - that of parent and child - begins entirely with a coincidence. The child is produced by whatever serendipity brought its parents together, and the fact that ...
The alarming lack of ideas that is recognizable in all acts of culture, politics, organization of life, and the rest is explained by this, and the weakness of the modernist constructers of functionalist cities is only a particularly visible example o...
Hindsight, I think, is a useless tool. We, each of us, are at a place in our lives because of innumerable circumstances, and we, each of us, have a responsibility (if we do not like where we are) to move along life's road, to find a better path if th...
Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God' - 'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry - but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held...
To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticize ideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fun...
God's fundamental goal for believers is not to protect us from harm or suffering, to make us comfortable, or to benefit from our service. You can biblically sum up God's primary aim for your whole life in one uncomfortable word: change. Ironic as it ...
The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculti...
The proletariat could plan to massacre the whole ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of seizing the secret of the atomic bomb and turning all of humanity entirely Jewish or entirely black: but a woman could not even dream of exterminatin...
