The Fight of Our Lives

By William Bennet. thomasnelson.com

The Fight of Our Lives is one of those books that makes a lot of useful observations, but never hits the bullseye. Bennett is guilty of the same shortcoming he accuses Americans and their leaders of having. They cannot say the full truth, either out of shame or out of blind ignorance.

The author details the enemy, radical Islam, with enough facts and background as to offer a convincing case. While he doesn't tar all of Islam with the terrorist brush, he rightly notes that Muslims confessing a moderate religious path need to do more to oppose terrorists.

It is also the work of the American government and the citizenry to fight. Here is where the argument is both best and worst. He correctly and convincingly identifies the biggest problem in the war on terror as the cultural battles being fought in America. Americans don't study their history or love their country. They have bought into the multi-culti deconstructionist habit of cutting down a nation's history and highlighting the negatives rather than the accomplishments. Thus America and the West have little self-confidence in fighting the terrorists, whom they could easily defeat if they were in the right mind.

This is all good, but what is missing is the real root of this, which is the feminization of society, the emasculation of men, and the destruction of marriage and the family largely because of feminism. The feminist takeover of Western society has left us adrift, lacking confidence, and fearful of people we could easily defeat. Like most Christian writers, Bennett is blind to this feminization, perhaps because of the feminizing tendencies of Christianity itself.

Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing

By Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice, 165 pages, Intervarsity Press.

An African Catholic theologian and an American Protestant pastor team up to reflect on reconciliation in the world using Christian principles. They reject the use of "experts" solving problems, preferring something deeper than the latest technique of peace-making.

In fact, this book is a loud "No!" to the technique-mentality, which claims that specially-trained people can swoop into a troubled situation and somehow clean up the mess for the local people. Katongole and Rice claim that true reconciliation starts with the locals, and keep such trained people at a distance. The problem with experts is that they don't know the local human and geographical terrain, and don't necessarily need to change their hearts.

When dealing with the massacre in Rwanda, killings in Durham, South Carolina, or racial tension everywhere, changed hearts rather than new policies or training workshops are needed. This is the long, slow process whereby local Christian, Jewish, and Muslim mothers cook together to feed children in Palestine, or where Hutus and Tutsis work as one to rebuild schools and churches, drinking banana beer out of the same cup in the sweltering heat. This is where members of multiracial churches in the American south work together on everyday church life.

Reconciling All Things rejects heroism, the big play that will magically resolve all tensions and heal all hurts. Loud revolution is not possible, and often, in fact, leads to more violence. When humans try to take peace-making into their own hands, violence and disaster happen, Rice and Katongole remind us again and again.

True Christian peacemakers realize that they don't own a map of reconciliation. They don't know where their work is leading. They are like Noah, building an ark even though it's not raining; or like Abraham, who left his country for an unknown land; or like Moses, who left his comfortable life to challenge the pharaoh on behalf of the Israelite slaves. These men heard a call – one that confused and disoriented them – but they followed nevertheless. Rice and Katongole call us to have the same faith as we embark on a long journey with no visible end.

The authors note that we embark on such a journey because of our restlessness for the way that things are: "even in a deeply divided world, even in the most deeply divided relationship, the way things are is not the way things have to be," they write, adding that God is central to this: "An emphasis on right relationship with God is crucial to a Christian vision of reconciliation."

The authors mince no words in rejecting the Christian peacemakers who, becoming ever more zealous, get so wrapped up in opposing and resisting things that they forget about God. They become bitter, angry, and burnt out. In contrast, Mother Teresa and Jean Vanier have offered the world laughter, smiles, and celebration because they always returned to their spiritual foundation, which they built on a strong theological foundation.

If we can rely on God, we can face the terrible injustices of the world rather than trying to bring about superficial reconciliation that is impatient with pain and suffering.

Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America

By Bill Donohue, $26.99, Faithwords, 258 pages.

Regarding Catholic dissidents, America's Catholic League president Bill Donohue writes: "What would make them happy? It's not clear even the dissidents know at this point. That is why they have become dissidents: they reckon that if they can't get their way, neither should the rank and file get what they want. Indeed, they'd rather be a nuisance than bolt."

Donohue, trained as a sociologist, writes primarily from his personal experiences battling against both Catholic dissidents and secular anti-Catholics – terming them all “nihilists.” A nihilist is someone who wants destruction for the sake of destruction. As Donohue points out, this contrasts with Marxists, who wanted to destroy capitalism so that they could build the perfect socialist society.

Secular Sabotage shows how nihilism has a particularly nasty edge to it. Nihilists don't take responsibility for their actions, nor have any respect for the Catholic individuals or the Church that they attack. They blame the targets of the attacks for the attack, much as Nazis blamed the Jews for antisemitism.

Donohue sees through the nihilist and radical left's smokescreens. These people, he notes, love humanity in the abstract, but have little respect or love for real people. They go so far in their disrespect of people to disrespect democracy, which is why such radicals rely on judicial activism in Western countries to overturn Judeo-Christian values.

Donohue as Catholic League president has had to fight a constant stream of lies and slander against the Church and Christianity, such as the claim – often made by Catholic dissidents – that the Church has more than 1 teaching on abortion.

Other lies and slander include: the Church has long opposed science; America's founding fathers were not deeply Christian; the separation of Church and state means that religion cannot enter the public sphere (when in fact, while that was allowed, the state's interference in religion was what was actually meant); the notion that pedophile priests result from the vow of chastity, when Richard John Neuhaus and others have correctly argued that if these men had been following their vows in the first place the pedophilia would never have happened.

Donohue's words often capture the spirit of opposition to the Church, such as the following: "Fixated on church-state issues, the ACLU has had much to say about paring back religion's role in society, but precious little about its free exercise. That's because the ACLU actually fears religion."

Radical feminists also hate and fear the Church and its stances on human sexuality and reproduction, and carry this hatred into the whole world, including the diplomatic world of the U.N. Donohue notes the "prevalence of anti-Catholicism" at the 1994 U.N Cairo Conference on Population and Development.

Secular Sabotage reflects the fact that Donohue is a tough character, which probably comes from having to fight a multi-frontal assault against his Church. He doesn't avoid examining the role of Catholics themselves in this malice, singling out nuns and sisters as having been particularly hurtful to the Church: "Most Catholics ... would be shocked to learn just how out of control some of these nun/activists have become." Donohue's hope for the Church and society is a tough hope. He doesn't seem ready to give up the fight just yet.

As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda

By Catherine Clare Larson, 284 pages, Zondervan.

"And so they worked, former murderers and survivors, pressed together inside a small yard, breaking the hard, bitter outer shell away from the sustaining grain."

Larson's above words testify to the entire point of this book and the hoped-for result of forgiveness: It is to restore community and trust after violence has shattered those things. Forgiveness, she notes, is "fundamentally, a social action with social implications." As We Forgive teaches that such forgiveness is not easy, but can only come by acknowledging the truth. Rwanda's violence between the Hutus and Tutsis, which peaked after April, 1994, in the violence against Tutsis and Hutu moderates, is presented through the personal stories of both victims and killers.

Decades of division and rivalry, sponsored by the colonialist Belgians, led to political domination by the Tutsis, and violent outbursts following political unrest, such as when the Tutsi king died in 1959.

After the violence of 1994, victims and perpetrator would often run into each other as they went about their daily business. Thus the rebuilt communities were fragile, in danger of falling back into terrible violence.

Larson presents the mysterious force of evil and violence alongside the mysterious force of goodness and forgiveness, believing firmly that the latter will win out because it is stronger and can build something. However, that construction is long and arduous, and absolutely necessary because the extreme violence of Rwanda changed the hearts for many for the worse:

"After killing, Saveri was changed. 'Something happened to me,' he said. 'I was not the same. I was void of peace in my heart from that moment.'" The demonic forces unleashed by the violence had deep roots not only because of the personal implication of people such as Saveri, but because of the "psychological foundations for this violence which the Hutu government had taken great pains to build before the slaughter had even begun.

In addition to looking at how survivors learn to forgive, inspired by Christ, As We Forgive makes the extremely important point of reflecting on the psychological and spiritual harm suffered by the killers by their own acts. People like Saveri were themselves deeply broken, and in need of counseling and forgiveness.

Christian leaders have been doing much of the community rebuilding work in Rwanda, because trust and transparency can only be re-established through the transformative gift of forgiveness. As We Forgive portrays pastors who have gone to the prisons to talk with the killers, trying to bring Christ to them even as the prisoners, stuffed into overcrowded prisons, try to come to terms with their guilt.

Only when they confess and receive forgiveness from their victims can the killers move on from their own brokenness. The victims themselves also experience a new freedom when they confront and then forgive their family's killers. Monique experienced this freedom only after walking for hours into the district where her violator still lived, knocking on his door and announcing to him that she forgave him, before turning around and walking back home.

The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command

By James Kalb, ISI Books, 317 pages.

James Kalb, an American Catholic lawyer, closely examines the new, feminist-liberal paternalism under which most Western countries, including Canada, have fallen. This movement has created a bureaucratic mindset that empowers the state against the family. Procedure firmly pushes people to act in certain ways, as in accepting many forms of sexuality that were once considered aberrant and sinful.

Education is used to form secular, even anti-Christian mindsets. It guides people towards hyper-individualism and a romantic view of careers, leaving traditional family and community behind.

A case in point is the changing notion of rights, which were originally seen as a limitation of the government's power over the individual. Rights limited power. The police could not arbitrarily throw someone in jail. Then liberals interpreted rights in a way that expanded the power of individuals: “I have the right to do what I want with my body.”

The problem here is that the rights of 1 person could clash with a second person (such as the unborn) or with the community (through a dramatic drop in the birth-rate). The left tries to solve such contradictions through interest group politics, where governments use bureaucratic control such as Canada's notorious Human Rights Tribunals to empower itself against a freely-acting person.

Repeatedly, Kalb explains how this bureaucratic intrusion into our daily lives goes against the normal flow of human and communal interactions: “Terms such as 'zero tolerance,' and 'political correctness' reveal how an official outlook deeply at odds with normal ways of thinking has become oppressive while claiming to have reached an unprecedented level of fairness and rationality.”

The left has decided that through interest group and entitlement politics it will use the notion of rights to actually empower the government against the individual, thus upending the very notion of rights. With this new power, the state has taken the place of the family, as Kalb writes, in “a wholly abstract and radically depersonalized order that abolishes connections and distinctions by which humans have always lived in favor of more formal ones such as wealth, education, and bureaucratic position.”

Kalb identifies the hypocrisy of such thinking. The very people who claim to be inaugurating this new society in the hopes of an egalitarian, free society, are simply setting up their own hierarchies and restrictions. Their state and corporate hierarchies are no less democratic, and it is not clear that meritocracies, much less sexual confusion, flimsy drug laws, and anti-family attitudes, are good for people and community.

Our market-oriented, bureaucratic society believes that the utilitarian principle is the best ideal by which to live – to give the most things to the most people in the most efficient way possible. This mindset allows for the abortion of millions of unborn as well as the horrendous conditions of factories around the world, as people in the first world frantically pursue careers, vacations, and new cars; in other words, as they frantically climb their way up the new hierarchy.

This is where Kalb's Catholicism comes in handy. He asks again and again if there is anything more to life than spiritless consumerism and careerism. The Tyranny of Liberalism calls for a return to traditional values, but even more, the author warns that to be human is to search for meaning. Ideally, it is the very nature of Catholics and Catholic societies to spend a great deal of time thinking about the meaning of life.

The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation

By Strobe Talbott, 479 pages hardcover.

Strobe Talbott, long-time political affairs journalist for Time magazine and Deputy Secretary of State from 1994-2001, examines the often scarcely-visible tendency of Western civilization towards unification. The groundwork laid by the ancient Hebrews towards universalism under one God, even if that people did not proselytize, has undergirded the blood-soaked West for centuries.

Talbott offers a refreshing light on Western military and political expansionism. Rather than the usual politically-correct emasculation, he emphasizes the culture-building that such figures as Alexander the Great and the non-Western Genghis Khan promoted.

He takes a fresh look at the “barbarian” and Viking “invasions”, which he terms “migrations”: “Like earlier waves from the east, these northern tribes set down roots that became entwined with those of the indigenous peoples and earlier invaders.”

While Talbott avoids the traps of left-wing defeatism, he offers an overly-bright survey of humanism and the Enlightenment, focusing almost uniquely on its positive accomplishments. The Great Experiment fails to investigate with any depth the violence – communal, military, and spiritual – that the eighteenth-century spawned.

Firstly, any Catholic-oriented assessment of this period must question the anti-Church violence as well as the Enlightenment's destruction of centuries-old spiritual life and community. France went in a few short centuries from being the dynamic intellectual and spiritual center of Catholicism to being overtly antagonistic philosophically and politically to Rome and to traditional Catholic community and society. The Church and the French nation have suffered immeasurably from this loss. The author's one-sided analysis of the Enlightenment reflects the weakness of the book as a whole for a Catholic audience.

Secondly, Talbott offers a very American and very Calvinist rendition of political, social, and military events over the past few centuries, spending the majority of the book analyzing the twentieth century and its murderous tragedies. This leads to an inflation of the importance of certain players, such as Bill Clinton, and events, such as speeches made by American senators, who with the passing of time will become less important characters of history.

In contrast, Talbott says nothing about such realities as the transforming demography of Europe and Japan in comparison with that of Muslim communities in Europe, parts of Africa, and southeast Asia. These energetic and densely-populated Islamic cultures will have a greater say in world affairs in the twenty-first century than old-stock Europeans and the Japanese will. In this sense, Talbott's optimism about world unification under Western leadership comes up a bit short when applied to the present and the future.

Also, Talbott falls into the same trap that every political dreamer does, which is to discount the spiritual for the temporal and naked power. He tends to overemphasize realpolitik, which denotes the cynical use of power in international relations.

In the latter part, Talbott fails because while he correctly points us toward some supranational organization with much more punch than the current U.N., he offers no reason as to why this is so important. Why should America or any other country give up giant pieces of its sovereignty for a politically-correct, inefficient group of anti-Western bureaucrats and Western feminist-liberal snobs?

The Great Experiment offers nothing new or grand for Catholics or other traditionalists because he latches onto the same philosophical nonsense that most modern Westerns do – something along the lines of Kant's Enlightenment belief that we can know right from wrong without a spiritual sense of things. That is to say without guarding our spiritual, Christian heritage in the West. This heritage in North America and Europe requires a sense of God's role in creation and the world, and therefore a belief that right and wrong come from God's revelation rather than from some supposedly enlightened, grown-up civilization.

Talbott fails to recognize that many earlier, religious societies that he sweeps through in his analysis were in some respects more mature than ours today.

A Life in Letters: Thomas Merton

Edited by William H. Shannon and Christine M. Bochen, hardcover 402, Harper.

Both traditionalists and renewalists love Merton so this thick book offers something to everyone. It reflects in depth the peacenik Merton who wrote against the Vietnam war, seeing it through a spiritual rather than geopolitical lens. This war, as well as the arms race, was for Merton really about deeper issues related to what he saw as the ugliness of modern, industrial living.

Merton the traditionalist opposed the commodification and commercialization of life. His letters reflect his love of deep, real relationships with people. He saw technology and industrialization as dehumanizing forces. His conception of Catholic freedom opposes the liberty that capitalism and consumerism offer:

“Our souls cannot be free if we believe only in money and power and comfort and having a good time. I do not think that our present line of action is doing anything to keep us free.”

These prophetic words were written when these economic and political changes were happening, and not from decades later after the fact. Though a convert to Catholicism, Merton was able to be so prophetic because of he was so deeply immersed in the Catholic worldview:

“I do not aim at the heights, I aim at the depths. Not at what is exalted and spectacular but what is humble and unenviable and unattractive and blank. I aspire to become a nonentity and to be forgotten.”

Merton's openness to the world came through a Catholic view of diversity rather than the current, post-modern one. He loved the variety of paths to God that the monastic life offered religious. Because of this high esteem for monastic and contemplative living, he had high standards for the religious orders. Echoing other mid-twentieth-century Catholics, he saw them and the Church as a whole, as having become too institutionalized.

Being so immersed in the roots of Catholicism, he took obedience to mean more than simply an institutional obedience that makes each religious a cog in an institutional wheel. Repeatedly, Merton called for the spirit of things to overshadow the institutionalization of things. Heavy institutionalization killed the spirit of individual monks, he noted: “[O]ur problem is not to be solved so much by rules as by men who are alive with the Spirit of the Risen Saviour and are not afraid to seek new paths guided by the light of perennial tradition and the wisdom of Mother Church.”

As A Life in Letters shows, Merton was keenly aware of his place as a monk in American society. He strongly believed in the value of his vocation for his fellow, secular Americans; the monastic vocation went against the capitalist-technological utilitarianism of modern living. The usefulness of a man of prayer was precisely the fact that he didn't fit into the paradigm of what was useful.

Since society was off the right tracks, a contemplative calling could bear prophetic witness. This view tied together Merton's social concerns with his contemplative life. He was qualified to speak out against war, nuclear build-up, prejudice, and industrialization only because he was a monk rooted in a way of living that was quite different from the rest.

Guantanamo North: Terrorism and the Administration of Justice in Canada

By Robert Diab, Fernwood Publishing, 120 pages,.

Western governments followed the Bush administration's example after 9/11 and used that tragedy as cover for increased government encroachment on personal liberties. Swept up in terrorism-inspired hysteria, most of the public did nothing, and in fact approved much of this power grab by the state. Safety in the short run seemed more important than ideals about freedom and curbing state power.

Now that some of the 9/11 dust has started to settle, and we no longer fear terrorists behind every tree, increased government power doesn't seem like such a good deal. The 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act and related amendments, as to the Canada Evidence Act, could potentially infringe too much on our rights as outlined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

An effective way to examine newfound government activities is through the experiences of those unfortunate enough to have their freedoms curtailed by these laws. Guantanamo North, the outcome of a Masters of Laws study, sets the theoretical framework, offers some legal history, and presents the cases of individuals targeted by Canada.

Diab does a good job of addressing several issues at once, and tying them all together in the exceptional conclusion of the book, where the sort of big questions we expect from legal philosophers do get asked.

First, Diab focuses throughout the book on the 2001 legislation's undermining of the age-old presumption of innocence, so central to English common law. Diab warns that “Out of an abundance of caution, we have proceeded to treat these men as guilty and to forgo the need to present evidence in a full trial. We have held them in an administrative limbo that is officially neither a detention pending deportation nor a punishment, but simply an indefinite incarceration. We have preferred to deal with these cases using the language of risk management rather than crime and punishment.”

Secondly, the secrecy behind many of the trials makes it nearly impossible for the accused to defend themselves, given that their lawyers cannot refute all of the charges. Diab believes in the common law system, whereby a suspect can robustly challenge the accusations. This component is missing when the government does not allow defendants and their lawyers the right to see all the information. Diab struggles to find a solution, calling for, at least, special advocates with security clearance allowed to see all the evidence so as to provide a more vigorous challenge to the government's accusations, something that is essential to justice and the respect of human rights.

Thirdly, Diab questions the need for and goodness of the expansion of “state privilege.” He offers the Arar case as an example of the dangers of expanded state privilege. Not all questions regarding the affair have been answered by the inquiry because the government “invoke[d] the new secrecy provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act to conceal much of the testimony of CSIS and RCMP personnel on their role in the incident, and to censor significant portions of the Inquiry's final report. Questions remain about the complicity of Canadian officials in Arar's torture and imprisonment in Syria.”

Diab laments the growing gulf between “practice and principle in the administration of justice.” Ottawa is failing to adequately follow the ideals of justice, and is denying people their full rights. Diab worries that the new measures taken by Canada's Parliament are permanent, whereas other countries had sunset clauses to emphasize the temporary nature of these increased governmental powers. Judges' independence have been compromised, as has the justice of the entire legal system in Canada. Criminal suspects are treated differently by the arresting authorities and the judiciary if they are suspected terrorists, which means that we are not all equal under the law.

Creating a Failed State: The US and Canada in Afghanistan

By John W. Warnock, 209 pages, Fernwood Publishing, ISBN 978-1-55266-2-625.

“[T]he United States is now deeply involved in World War IV, the struggle to control natural resources and in particular oil and gas. The primary area of conflict has been the less-developed countries, including those declared to be failed states.” So writes Warnock in this damning book on American and Western greed and colonialism.

America's involvement in the Middle East follows the logic of oil rather than the logic of justice and peace. If Saddam Hussein starts selling too much oil to China and elsewhere, take over the country. If Afghanistan won't allow pipelines and other petroleum-related infrastructure, take over the country.

Many pieces of American foreign policy (and its poodles such as Britain, Canada, and Australia) are linked to this thirst for oil. The goal of containing Russia and to a lesser extent China aims for American control of Caspian Sea oil, working closely with American oil companies.

Washington negotiated with Pakistan and the Taliban for the better part of 2001 over Caspian Sea oil as a way to shut out Iran, since both governments were anti-Iran. Warnock reports, though, that America, with the help of Russia, was actually thinking of invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. This plan, which somewhat counters the containment of Russia theory, “was widely discussed at the July 2001 meeting of the G8 countries in Geneva.”

The politics in Creating a Failed State, as the above shows, are shocking in their single-mindedness and lack of respect for the lives, cultures, and nationhoods of the target countries. In fact, Warnock links this neo-colonial indifference to the lives of people with the mentality of the nineteenth-century European colonists, who also put a premium on the lives of their own citizens even while committing countless acts of violence against subjected populations.

Creating a Failed State follows American oil imperialism as it built up Islamists during the Cold War. The leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood admitted that “America made Islam” in the 1960s. Washington helped al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups recruit fighters from all over the world, including from Brooklyn.

During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Arab, Pakistani, and Afghan trainers were trained by the CIA in America. Bin Laden's main focus at this time was on the “Little Satan,” the Soviet Union, but he became incensed when Saudi Arabia allowed American troops on Islam's holy land in 1991.

America's relationships with jihadists in the 1990s were confused, as Washington often had them do its dirty work. Yet throughout the decade, the Islamic fighters constantly increased their activities and rhetoric against America.

Because of Washington's belief in bin Laden's continued utility, it never had him extradited even though the Sudan (and the Taliban after that) had offered this and even though countless opportunities for his capture had presented themselves.

Why didn't America nab bin Laden when he was in the American Hospital in Dubai for kidney treatment from July 4-July 14, 2001? Bin Laden “was even visited by the head of the CIA operation in the city. But the US government did not ask for his extradition,” Warnock notes. Bin Laden, it seems, was still America's guy right up until 9/11. Even in 2002, when holed up in Tora Bora by the US military, he was allowed to escape.

Why did so many senior Bush administration officials deny that they had advanced knowledge of 9/11 when so many foreign governments, including those of Jordan, Israel, and Russia, had warned them? The former Egyptian defense minister Mohammed Heikal said after 9/11 that it was impossible for the American government not to have known of the planned attack.

Looking back, in the days immediately before September 11, why do we see such frenetic stock market activity from World Trade Center-based companies such as Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and from United and American Airlines?

While American and Canadian neo-colonialism in Afghanistan is bad enough, the politics and purported dirty dealings that occurred before 9/11 are disturbing to say the least.

American Babylon: Notes of an American Exile

By Richard John Neuhaus, Basic Books.

The late Father Neuhaus takes on America's morally relativist intelligentsia in his new book, principally by focusing on the late philosopher Richard Rorty, whom the author sees as one of the bedrock voices of relativism.

Neuhaus spends considerable effort explaining how the thin American understanding of church results in a too-great sanctification of the country. In this erroneous view, America replaces the church, and people bestow on the country a sacred calling that no state or political endeavor should or could ever have.

In fact, America to a large degree parallels the Babylon of ancient Israelite exile. America, or any country, is exile for Christians because Christians ultimately give their hearts to heaven, not to mammon and country. Humans must work within the world, just as the prophet Jeremiah told the Israelites in Babylon that they should work for the betterment of their new country. Yet this kind of progress occurs only when people of faith, then or now, look to a higher good than the world:

“What we should have learned from the past 200 years, and especially from the catastrophes of the twentieth century, is that history is not the answer to the question that is history.” History can only “participate in its own redemption” when it recalls its higher purpose, thus when “the transcendent and the immanent, the infinite and the finite, are so conjoined,” Neuhaus argues.

American Babylon examines some of the awful ethics thinking brought about by the current round of relativism, including that of professor Peter Singer, who takes controversial positions on animals rights and eugenics:

“His ethical theory exults in its liberation from particular time and place and from the authoritative references that have shaped our traditions of the moral life.” Like Rorty, Singer believes that the moral truth is what we say the moral truth is. Without a higher reference, based on religious and ethical traditions like Christianity, the possibility of not only abortion but also infanticide is open to humans.

The heart of this book is Neuhaus' discussion on Rorty, the great American relativist who like Singer and Nietzsche believed that humans make up their morality, and so can change their ethical thinking at any time. Ethics, like everything else, is a will to power for these thinkers.

Rorty's manner of ethical and philosophical relativism is highly relevant to Catholics and any one who cares about right and wrong. People with his attitude confront Christians almost every day when the religious and ethical issues arise.

Since for Rorty right and wrong do not exist outside of human definitions of right and wrong, he thinks it is imperative that liberals try to change the way people talk about ethical issues because we will never be able to solve our irreconcilable differences. Rorty invites his followers to simply duck the whole debate.

First, people can turn the deep, serious ethical conversation into something lighthearted. They can tease and joke and “josh” the concerned person of morals into giving up the conversation. If this doesn't work, good old-fashioned ignoring can work as well.

Thus we see on university campuses the attempt by pro-choice groups to limit or deny campus and student union services to pro-life groups. Rather than inviting an open, honest, and intellectual debate, pro-choice groups simply shut down the conversation and define the issue as how they see fit. In other words, from their more powerful position they simply will the debate to go away.

Such groups believe that they are creating a morality-free public zone, and that Catholics and others can keep their religious and ethical thoughts off campus and in their homes, safely out of sight. Yet Neuhaus doesn't buy this argument. American Babylon is a search for the proper response to such people, and an attempt to show just how moralizing and value-laden these secularists really are.

The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming

By Tony Weis, 217 pages, Fernwood Publishing.

“In their quest to increase markets and profits, agro-TNCs [transnational corporations] are relentlessly forging input dependence and standardizing the nature of agriculture production, subjecting soaring farm animal populations to brutalizing treatment, toxifying soils and water and externalizing environmental costs, reshaping dietary aspirations, breaking local bonds between production and consumption, devalorizing labour” and so on.

Tony Weis' above words reflect the harsh reality that The Global Food Economy discusses from a geographic and historical view. He condenses the history of capitalism, from English enclosure (privatization of the land) in the late middle ages until the twentieth century.

He examines the devastation of capitalism on the “commons,” the land held by all and on which people's animals pizza, thout charge to the owners. While enclosure started in England, almost no country has been spared, as it spread throughout Europe and then overseas to the Americas and beyond. As much as 50% of the world's population was affected by this rapid transition after WWII.

Clearly, the people most affected, the peasant-farmers, had no say in this shocking reorganization. In some cases such as China, daily calorie counts went up rapidly. But Weis consistently points out that while many poor people often did benefit, they usually didn't (especially in the long run), and the process inflicted – and continues to inflict – deep ecological damage.

Agribusiness hurt human ecologies by eliminating millennia-old farming cultures and techniques. When people moved from the villages to factories in the cities, they broke with their rural traditions and they failed to pass on their farming knowledge to their children. The food industry replaced this culture with pseudo-culture:

“Also related to branding strategies and the de-spatialization and de-culturation of food is the corporate manipulation of place and culture, with many packaged items given an exotic facade that often bears little or no connection to where the food was actually produced and processed: 'Mexican' corn chips, 'Moroccan' soup, 'Mediterranean' pizza, 'Caribbean' fruit punch, 'Cantonese' spring rolls.”

Weis shows the process and results of the “commodification of everything,” specifically how “sentient life has been commodified” through extreme violence. Ethics of food production no longer revolves around what is good for the community nor around what is the most respectful and least painful for animals and the environment. Instead, industrial agriculture dominates animal life and obeys only “the almighty law of competitiveness.”

Capitalism's imperialism has gone way beyond imperializing humans, to taking over the entire planet. Weis spends a great deal of time examining how agribusiness treats animals. Male chicks are ground live into feed or fertilizer, while the hens are packed, 10,000 to a building, their beaks clipped without anesthetic even though the beak contains dense nerves. Their feet are so cramped that they sometimes grow around the cage. And so on.

The same fate awaits pigs and cows, with male calves quickly removed from their mothers “and sentenced to solitary crates so small they can barely move so as to inhibit muscle development before they are killed for veal after three to four months.”

Good grief.

Canada's Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System

By Jim Harding, 272 pages, Fernwood Publishing, ISBN 9 7815 5266 2267, $24.95.

Jim Harding offers nothing less than a blockbuster with this densely-packed book that will make readers rage at the cynicism of politics. The “Nuclear Development Party” – Saskatchewan's NDP – come off as a particularly nasty bunch.

Harding paints the province's sometimes-fabled left-wing party that brought medicare to Canada as an organization that time and again turned its back on good environmental sense and ignored the clear and constant wish of its grassroots. Once re-elected in 1992, it abruptly rejected the anti-nuclear position it had adopted while in opposition to the Grant Devine Tory government.

The NDP's close dance with nuclear goes back to the venerable Tommy Douglas himself. The author, who idolized Douglas, was shocked when as a young political neophyte he discovered that the Great Leader had such links.

One often thinks that faraway, sparsely-populated flatlands like Saskatchewan have somehow retained their purity. All the nastelling the truth.

“One is really talking about storage ient Saskatchewan right in the eye of the hurricane when it comes to geo-politics. In fact, the province played a vital role in the twentieth-century's love-affair with nuclear bombs and nuclear power.

Harding cuts to the chase quickly, repeatedly, and from countless angles.

First, people can't claim with clear consciences that Saskatchewan uranium is only used for peaceful purposes. It is impossible to know for certain whether the province's uranium ends up in nukes. Second, supposing that it doesn't end up in nukes, when used in America or France's nuclear energy system, Saskatchewan's uranium frees up a corresponding amount of uranium in those countries which they can then put into their weapons programs.

Second, Harding rejects the belief that uranium is a clean fuel. This is wrong for two reasons. The extraction of uranium from the ground takes an exorbitant amount of fossil fuel, and theno matter what the general public wants.