Theoria

“The Fear of God: The Religious Right is Afraid to Speak and the Left is Afraid to Listen” in Saturday’s Ottawa Citizen. The article reports on a conference organized by the newly minted — with the support of Reform Party founder and son of a preacher man, Preston Manning — Manning Centre for Building Democracy. The gloss on Manning’s advice to those attempting to push a radical Christian politics in Parliament:

But on a recent Saturday in downtown Ottawa, about 90 suit-and-tie Christians listened in silence as Mr. Manning brought them lessons from the political wilderness: Drop the God talk, tone down the righteous indignation, take your time. Issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage will not be resolved in a single vote.

Right-wing Christian organizations have taken on a face in recent years, in part encouraged by the success of Stephen Harper. For instance, the National House of Prayer, also newly created and in Ottawa, seeks to ‘establish a presence in Canada’s capital to pray for government’. Ottawa has also recently seen the opening of the Institute of Marriage and Family, widely seen as the Canadian wing of Focus on the Family. (Although Canada does, in fact, have a Focus on the Family chapter, the Institute of Marriage and Family benefits from a different appellation. and isn’t located at the P.O. Box in Langley, B.C..)

In other news, an interview with Marcel Gauchet, most famously the author of The Disenchantment of the World, from Le Monde.

Europeans’ problem is that they can no longer understand what religion means in societies where it still maintains a structural power. They’ve forgotten their own past. For them, religion has become a system of individual and private beliefs. Now the rest of the world does not operate that way. It also is not spared the “departure” of religion which accelerates with globalization. But this “departure” of the religious organization of the world, destroyed by urbanization, Western-style economism, liberal thought, technical efficiency and consumption cohabits with an aspiration to rediscover traditional religion.

One might wish to compare Gauchet’s comments with those of Zizek.

Richard Hass tells us to “rethink sovereignty“. Which is, incidentally, the suggestion that James J. Sheehan, makes in his presidential lecture to the American Historical Assocation, “The Problem of Sovereignty in European History“. It seems that Sheehan has little new to say:

What is the problem of sovereignty ? It is, first of all, a problem of definition. Sovereignty is obviously a political concept, but unlike political concepts such as democracy or monarchy, it is not about the location of power (the sovereign, Hobbes wrote, can be “the one or the many”); unlike parliament or bureaucracy, it does not describe institutions that exercise power; and unlike order or justice, it does not define the purposes of power. The concept of sovereignty has to do with the relationship of political power to other forms of authority. Sovereignty assumes, first of all, that political power is distinct from other organizations in the community—religious, familial, economic. Second, sovereignty asserts that this public authority is preeminent and autonomous, that is, superior to institutions within the community and independent from those outside. In theory, the sovereign can be no one’s vassal: at home, sovereigns are masters; abroad, they are the equals of other sovereigns.

Sheehan’s lecture ends pretty much were it began:

As has been the case throughout sovereignty’s long and complex history, the makers of sovereign claims both assert their authority and accept its limitations, defend their terrain and acknowledge where it ends. And as always, there is a distance between sovereign theory and practice, between the order and stability promised by the doctrine and the compromises and unresolved conflicts imposed in the realm of political action. Sovereignty, in other words, continues to be a problem and thus helps us to recognize the lines of continuity that join Europe’s present to its past.

Paging David “D-Ho” Horwitz: a new frontier in the battle for an Academic Bill of Rights — “supervisor abuse”.

And, finally, Somali pirates are back in the news. This time skirmishing with American warships. Apparently the biggest problem with these pirates is that we don’t know who to blame. The article puts it clearly: ” Their nationalities were unknown.”