Daedalus articles from June 2003

Daedalus archives from June 2003

Congress & the Court.(Comment)
June 22, 2003... The United States in recent years has been drifting toward an important confrontation over constitutional limits on the power of the federal government. Three years ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia took the extraordinary step of...

Why religion still matters.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... The question put to religion by the secular Enlightenment in its Freudian and Marxist manifestations is asked in a different way in the age of terrorism. The old question was, How can otherwise sensible people, in affirming God as a source of...

Secularism & its discontents.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... In the quarter century since the Iranian Revolution took much of the world by surprise--not least in the way its religious leadership mobilized a genuinely popular uprising--many commentators in the West have been inclined to see the Middle...

'Fundamentalism' ancient & modern.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... During the reign of the Seleucid King Antiochus Epiphanes (r. 175-164 B.C.E.), lawless men arose in Israel and urged their fellow Jews to follow Greek customs in defiance of the laws of God. The king commanded the Jews to sacrifice pigs in the...

Our religio-secular world.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... In recent decades, many experts have marshaled empirical data demonstrating a secular trend in modern societies. Still other experts, marshaling different data, have documented a resurgent religiosity in these same societies. As a result of...

A bill for establishing religious freedom.(on secularism & religion)(Transcript)
June 22, 2003... Editor's note: Three years after writing the "Declaration of Independence," Thomas Jefferson drafted a bill "for establishing religious freedom" in the state of Virginia. After declaring its independence from England, Virginia had stripped the...

The renaissance of Islam.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... In Western accounts of the Middle East since 1789, Islam is often treated as a primary impediment to the spread of technology, science, and modern democratic values in the region. As a review of the historical record demonstrates, nothing could...

The case of Turkey.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... Although most partisans of republican Turkey expected modernization to lead to a decline in religious attachments, that did not happen. Instead, the processes of modernization transformed traditional Islamic beliefs and groupings and moved...

The case of India.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... British India was partitioned in 1947, at the very moment the nation became independent of England. (1) Partition followed the failure, despite prolonged efforts, of the British government and the Indian National Congress (the oldest and...

Lessons from the Muslim world.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... Secularism has come under assault over the course of the last two decades, in developing as well as industrialized societies, in democracies as well as dictatorships. Christian, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish fundamentalisms, with different...

Jews, Muslims & the prospects for pluralism.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... The question of the hour is whether Islamic fundamentalism can be compatible with democracy. Though important, that question is subordinate to another: whether Islamic fundamentalism can make its peace with religious pluralism. After all, a...

Against liberal monism.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... Despite the separation of church and state in America, religion and politics in this country have long influenced one another in ways direct and indirect. This theme was advanced by Alexis de Tocqueville in his masterwork, Democracy in America....

Unhealthy beliefs: religion & the plague of war.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... In response to the savage terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, my country has resolved to wage the first war of the third millennium. The terrorist attack unjustly murdered thousands of...

The future of an illusion.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... 1 Karl Marx was neither a determinist nor a vulgar materialist and never said that religion was "the opium of the people." What he did say, in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, was that it was at once the expression of inhuman...

The clash within civilizations.(on secularism & religion)
June 22, 2003... There is some reason to worry that Samuel Huntington's messianic vision of a "clash of civilizations," even though it seemed to many of his commentators to be based on a rather superficial understanding of various parts of the world, might...

The One Thousand Days.(Poem)(Poem)
June 22, 2003... There is the mourning dish of salt outside My door, a cup of quarantine, saucerless, a sign That one inside had been taken down By grieving, ill tongue-tied will or simple Illness, yet trouble came. I have found...

Men of rough persuasion.(Fiction)(Short Story)
June 22, 2003... Almost lost among the gabbies and goombahs, fakeloos and funnelheads, catamites and hypes, rajahs and ringers, and can-openers and Visigoths in the twenty-plus chapters that are The Gates of Hell, a semi-sci-fi mystery with no little tallyho at...

Dialogue between Kwame Anthony Appiah & Robert S. Boynton: on philosophy, race, sex &c.(Dialogue)(Interview)
June 22, 2003... ROBERT S. BOYNTON: You recently became a U.S. citizen. Why? KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: There are very few differences between the things you can do as a resident alien and as a citizen, but I wanted to be able to vote and to be on juries. And I...

On Americans & inequality.(notes)
June 22, 2003... Americans, unlike the citizens of other prosperous democracies, not to mention those of poor countries, do not seem to care much about inequality. One might think that our attitude toward it must sooner or later change--especially now that the...

On environmental law.(notes)
June 22, 2003... Many countries as well as some U.S. states recognize a constitutional human right to a healthful environment. But the federal government of the United States does not. Given restrictive trends in the federal courts, an anti-environmental...