Queer Atheist on ‘Karl Barth A Life in Conflict, by Prof Christiane Tietz &Dr Victoria J. Barnett’ & Justification: ‘The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection’ .Hans Kung.
Editor: Read chapter 7 of Karl Barth A Life in Conflict by Prof Christiane Tietz & Dr Victoria J. Barnett
7. “Not a Stone Left Standing”: The Second Version of the Epistle to the Romans, 1922 A Critical Turn The new version of the Epistle to the Romans Critics and Admirers What is Dialectical Theology? Dialectical Traveling Companions: Brunner, Bultmann, Gogarten Fifteen Questions and Sixteen Answers: The Controversy with Harnack
It was slightly embarrassing to be in Greek life when I was at college. Or maybe I was just slightly embarrassed; I really needed to pay dues to have access to friends? Weren’t sororities kind of retrograde, and the people who inhabited them vapid and conforming? Wasn’t the point of college to branch out on your own, instead of sheltering in place with a bunch of people more or less identical to you?
To rush, which is the process by which Greek houses vie for freshman and vice versa, you had to haul ass all day down the main drag off-campus where all the sorority and frat houses were, wearing the same T-shirt as thousands of other Greek hopefuls, smiling and tugging down jean shorts from wherever they’d migrated to on your person. The actual recruitment felt like a hyper-feminized job interview. There was singing, clapping, the kind of hug where torsos don’t touch, and many forced conversations and fake compliments. A girl might tell you, “I love your hair!” and then to the next girl in line, “I love your hair!”
I’ve been having flashbacks this month because videos of rush from across America have been going viral on TikTok; the trend, which has earned the name ‘RushTok,’ is a modern fragmented reality show, told from multiple perspectives. New girls on campus film themselves nervously getting ready to embark on the days’ tight schedules—their eye trained on a specific combination of three Greek letters out on the horizon. The houses themselves put out high-energy agitprop for Delta Delta Delta, or Kappa Kappa Gamma, or whatever. The moms of the freshmen, or Rush Moms, have emerged as bit characters to speak out about the stress it causes them to watch their daughter compete in a social obstacle course.
Earlier this week, the Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan revealed she has been sucked into the carousel of outfits and accessories—including translucent totes with “the widest, most luxurious grosgrain ribbons you’ve ever seen in your life”—and her conclusion is this: “As cowed as the Bambi-like PNMs [potential new members] may appear in their original videos, membership itself seems to make showgirls of them all.”
Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, discusses his essay “The Straussian Moment,” describing how the ancients believed in the power of the intellect and the weakness of the will, but how today we believe the opposite. We want machines to do the thinking, because we don’t trust rationality. Also, Thiel gives his overview on the current American political scene and discusses whether he will endorse President Trump in 2020.
Peter Thiel made this point on The James Altucher Show while discussing his recently released book (Zero to One). At minute 11:35 of the podcast, he mentions how some of the more successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley share this common “dysfunction”:
“One of the strange things in Silicon Valley is that so many of these successful entrepreneurs suffer from a mild form of Asperger’s or something like that. And I always think of this as an incredible indictment of our society: What sort of society is it where, if you do not have Asperger’s, you will pick up on all these social cues that discourage you from pursuing creative original ideas.”
Editor: Mr. Brooks column of Sept. 25, 2025 provides a‘Political Theology’, in five paragraphs! I’ve placed in italics some of the key points, of this excerpt. Charlie Kirk was a Zionist Apologist, in sum a Fellow Traveler, whose political evolution toward Catholicism, was an unhappy fact to his Zionist Pay Masters, according to his close friend Candace Owens!
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The problem is that politics is prosaic. Deliberation and negotiation work best in a mood of moderation and equipoise. If you want to practice politics in the mood best suited for the altar call, you’re going to practice politics in a way that sends prudence out the window.
Fourth, a destructive kind of syncretism prevails. Syncretism is an ancient religious problem. It occurs when believers try to merge different kinds of faith. These days, it’s faith in Jesus and the faith in MAGA all cocktailed together. Syncretism politicizes and degrades faith and totalizes politics.
Fifth, it kicks up a lot of hypocrisy. It’s nice to hear Carlson say he practices a religion of love, harmony and peace, but is that actually the way he lives his life?
Finally, it causes people to underestimate the power of sin. The civil rights movement had a well-crafted theory of the relationship between religion and politics. The movement’s theology taught its members that they were themselves sinful and that they had to put restraints on their political action in order to guard against the sins of hatred, self-righteousness and the love of power. Without any such theory, MAGA imposes no restraints, and sin roams free.
The critics of Christian nationalism sometimes argue that it is a political movement using the language and symbols of religion in order to win elections. But the events of the past week have proved that this is a genuinely religious movement and Charlie Kirk was a genuinely religious man. The problem is that unrestrained faith and unrestrained partisanship are an incredibly combustible mixture. I am one of those who fear that the powerful emotions kicked up by the martyrdom of Kirk will lead many Republicans to conclude that their opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible. It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross
Editor: The final Brooks puerile pronouncement should not surprise!
It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.
Here is my commentary on Mr. Bromwich’s American Breakdown in 2018 in The London Review of Books :
The ‘insights’ of david.bromwich@yale.edu : a collection of quotes and commentary on his London Review of Books essay ‘American Breakdown’. Part One? By Political Observer (Revised)
Mr. Bromwich manages to avoid the current political hysteria ,or simply to mute it, therefore making it more palatable to the reader, than the Corporate Media hysterics.He even manages to shame these political actors, yet at the same moment to exercise a kind of restrained iteration of the current Party Line.
Much of the damage to US politics over the last two years has been done by the anti-Trump media themselves, with their mood of perpetual panic and their lack of imagination. But the uncanny gift of Trump is an infectious vulgarity, and with it comes the power to make his enemies act with nearly as little self-restraint as he does.
Mr. Bromwich’s Bill of Attainder includes Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt to the EPA, and his successor Andrew Wheeler both products of an utterly corrupt American Corporatism. Next in order of consideration is Iran, and the Wars of Empire: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, all fully endorsed by the New Democrats, led by ‘tougher than any man in the room’ Mrs. Clinton. An utter inconvenience to Mr. Bromwich’s reserved indictment.
But the patient, indeed, doubtful reader of this writer’s judgement is taken aback by this deviation from the Party Line:
Russia remains the obsessional concern. Not wanting to restart the Cold War might seem one of the few good ideas attributable to Trump, no matter how he came by it, but the pride of the Democrats is invested in pushing him towards renewed conflict: stiffer sanctions, cyber implants, enhanced deployments and joint military exercises with Nato – nothing (it is said) should be ‘off the table’. American commentators lack even a minimal awareness of the circumstances of the eastward push of Nato after 1990. President George H.W. Bush, in return for a united Germany, had promised that Nato would expand ‘not one inch eastward’; and the evacuation of this pledge in the years that followed, under Clinton, the younger Bush and Obama, has rightly been considered a betrayal by every Russian leader from Gorbachev to Putin.
History intrudes itself into a subject not mentioned, but the constant sub-text of the Anti-Trump coterie’s agitprop : The New Cold War fomented by Mrs. Clinton, her minions, and the perpetually bloodthirsty Neo-Conservatives, who have a continuing political romance with her jingoism, expressed by the notion of her ‘toughness’. History is again utterly inconvenient, Mr. Bromwich should be congratulated for this moment of clarifying honesty. A long quote from the virtuous martyred American political saint Lincoln adds more historical depth.
Next in order of appearance are political hysterics Senator Joe McCarthy and Congressman Adam Schiff. Then to Patrick Buchanan and his :
‘Many Putin actions we condemn were reactions to what we did. Russia annexed Crimea bloodlessly. But did not the US bomb Serbia for 78 days to force Belgrade to surrender her cradle province of Kosovo? How was that more moral than what Putin did in Crimea?’
By this quotation from Mr. Buchanan, identifies Mr. Bromwich as an Apostate to the current New Cold War Mythology!
Next in line are considerations of the Republican Party’s ‘collaboration’ with Trump and the utterly preposterous , but self-congratulatory notion of the ‘Resistance’. Recall the quote from Goya: ‘The sleep of reason brings forth monsters’ !
Mr. Bromwich then opines that:
Police, for the most part, haven’t yet shown a pro-Trump disposition, and Democrats should want to keep things that way. Among officers of law enforcement at all levels, Trump’s role as an instigator of popular disorders is the strongest point against him.
The years 2016 and 2017 have escaped the political memory of Mr. Bromwich, in which 2600, mostly black people, were murdered by police in America, without one conviction in a court of law. The Police have already rendered a verdict. The ‘Broken Widows Policy’ of the Manhattan Institute, has evolved into a siege mentality- the domestic corollary of the War on Terror. A bourgeois pundit like Mr. Bromwich dare not go that far in his Apostasy.
The first part of Mr. Bromwich’s ends with the ‘Democrats’ and the feckless dullard Comey, playing a new role as FBI Hero, straight out of the manufactured lore of movies,radio and television propaganda, spanning generations. The scandal of the FBI Crime Laboratory remains unmentioned in Mr. Bromwich commentary:
See John F. Kelly author of Tainting Evidence : Behind the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab on C-Span address here of July 10, 1998:
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Reflections on the New Encampment Culture
There were many puzzling features of the recent protests. This coming year, universities must course correct—while protecting the right to dissent.
I had better now make my position clear to avoid a misunderstanding. In April and May, and earlier for that matter, I would have supported a campus teach-in, or better, a campus-originated march on the White House or the Pentagon to demand an immediate Israeli cessation of bombing and to press for the negotiation of a ceasefire, under threat of withdrawal of American support. It took a very few days, however, for the protests to face in an altogether different direction: what began as an anti-war protest had turned anti-Israel, without regard to peace or war, and it seemed clear that, for some people, the Palestinian flag had taken on a new meaning, including the erasure of Israel from the map.
It had become unclear anyway—in strictly political terms—by what logic the universities were the most effectual staging ground for a protest. Yet the encampments, the slogans they chanted, and the symbols they asked to be known by, all seemed a natural expression of the politics that has come in the public mind to represent the universities.
The long-term consequences of the specialization of campus politics have been unhappy for American society generally. Political complexity of mind is rare among students, but the same students will go on to be full-time citizens. Some of the fault is traceable to university administrators: their political position-taking, after recent elections and supreme court decisions and certain shocking local or national events, has seemed to define the boundaries of polite opinion. Such public statements are now being pulled back, with recent moves toward “institutional neutrality,” and that is a good thing. The idea that universities, as if they were a person, should carve out an official stance on social and political issues of the day is a recent innovation; it has had a fair trial and been found useful mainly as an instrument of social control and conformity—neither of which qualifies as an educational value.
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Two telling political/moral questions present themselves in Mr. Bromwich’ s long essay: that he is ‘The Voice of Reason’ and that somehow Jewish Students are not subject to the ‘Call of Tribalism’, or that Jewish Vagilities didn’t attacked UCLA student with impunity!
Mr. Bromwich is a ‘Liberal’, this political creature long, left behind in an American Politics dominated by New Democrats, Republicans, Neo-Conservatives , all held together by AIPAC money!
A wrong lesson has been learned from an airbrushed memory of the 1960s. The antiwar protests of that time may have begun in college teach-ins, but they went on to organized marches in big cities. Disrupting the universities became part of the program only in a later and decadent phase; and even as the narrowest of tactics, it never made sense. The truth is that “shut-it-down” campus protests were the path of least resistance, the method closest to home, but they pushed against the necessary ethic of a university because they involved an element of coercion.
The implication for the present moment is clear. On no account should students or their faculty supporters be allowed to prevent the speech or disrupt the intellectual work of any member of a university. If students opt out of attending classes, or otherwise fail to satisfy academic expectations, the normal penalties should apply. Meanwhile, of course, the right to dissent has as natural a home in a university as it does in a free society more broadly.
Lets hear from that original ‘60’s’ Radical Mario Savio: I watched this on the ‘Evening News’ of the time!
Editor: Mr. Brooks column of Sept. 25, 2025 provides a‘Political Theology’, in five paragraphs! I’ve placed in italics some of the key points, of this excerpt. Charlie Kirk was a Zionist Apologist, in sum a Fellow Traveler, whose political evolution toward Catholicism, was an unhappy fact to his Zionist Pay Masters, according to his close friend Candace Owens!
…
The problem is that politics is prosaic. Deliberation and negotiation work best in a mood of moderation and equipoise. If you want to practice politics in the mood best suited for the altar call, you’re going to practice politics in a way that sends prudence out the window.
Fourth, a destructive kind of syncretism prevails. Syncretism is an ancient religious problem. It occurs when believers try to merge different kinds of faith. These days, it’s faith in Jesus and the faith in MAGA all cocktailed together. Syncretism politicizes and degrades faith and totalizes politics.
Fifth, it kicks up a lot of hypocrisy. It’s nice to hear Carlson say he practices a religion of love, harmony and peace, but is that actually the way he lives his life?
Finally, it causes people to underestimate the power of sin. The civil rights movement had a well-crafted theory of the relationship between religion and politics. The movement’s theology taught its members that they were themselves sinful and that they had to put restraints on their political action in order to guard against the sins of hatred, self-righteousness and the love of power. Without any such theory, MAGA imposes no restraints, and sin roams free.
The critics of Christian nationalism sometimes argue that it is a political movement using the language and symbols of religion in order to win elections. But the events of the past week have proved that this is a genuinely religious movement and Charlie Kirk was a genuinely religious man. The problem is that unrestrained faith and unrestrained partisanship are an incredibly combustible mixture. I am one of those who fear that the powerful emotions kicked up by the martyrdom of Kirk will lead many Republicans to conclude that their opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible. It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross
Editor: The final Brooks puerile pronouncement should not surprise!
It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.
Hume’s Imagination Tito Magri, Hume’s Imagination, Oxford University Press, 2023, 512pp., $165.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192864147. Reviewed by Donald C. Ainslie, University of Toronto,
Editor: A very short quotation from Bret Stephens latest exercise of free imaginative variation, of September 23, 2025 in The New York Times:
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It’s a cliché, but can’t be said enough, that speech is genuinely free only when it’s speech we like the least from those we dislike the most. Rosa Luxemburg put it well: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
Shana tova.
(Hebrew. Used as a greeting during Rosh Hashanah and the Days of Awe; or shana tova (שָׁנָה טוֹבָה), “a good year”, or shana tova umetuqa (שָׁנָה טוֹבָה וּמְתוּקָה) “a good and sweet year”)
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Editor: The very notion that Zionist Political Shill Bret Stephens would quote Rosa Luxemburg, makes this reader cringe!
