By B. Venkat Mani · Friday, February 26, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
On November 26, 2020, when international borders were still partially closed due to the global coronavirus pandemic, a new democratic and peaceful movement was taking shape in India, led by farmers. They wanted to register their protest against three contentious agricultural reform laws covering “Produce Trade and Commerce,” “Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services,” and an amendment in the definition of “Essential Commodities.” Thousands of men, women, and children from the farming communities of the northern states of Punjab and Haryana left their homes and fields and drove on tractors and pick-up trucks hitched with “trolleys” (trailers) to New Delhi.
At the borders of the national capital of the world’s largest democratic nation, the farmers witnessed the full display of the power of their own elected federal government. Their attempts to enter the city were blocked by the deployment of a heavy police force, and the capital was closed off at several points; excavators were sent to dig up trenches, elaborate multilayered barricading was erected with massive concrete boulders generally used to prevent the impact of bombings, iron grills normally used in India to control traffic and set up temporary checkpoints were placed, covered with barbwire to assure extra security, and if all of this was not enough, water tankers were brought in to spray cold water on the farmers, who were also beaten up with lathis (batons).
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, January 26, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Aryeh Botwinick about his article “Negative Theology, Power, and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, January 14, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Annabel Herzog about her article “When Arendt Said ‘We’: Jewish Identity in Hannah Arendt’s Thought,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
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By Jean-Marie Rouart · Monday, January 4, 2021 This essay appeared in Le Figaro on December 8, 2020, and this translation by Russell A. Berman is published with permission of the author. Hyperlinks are from the original, while footnotes have been added by the translator. Translator’s comments are here.
In the face of a very real Islamist threat that has led to violence and which the proposed law on “separatism” attempts to address, it is interesting to try to raise the level of the debate. It is necessary to inquire calmly into a question that worries those thinkers least inclined to emotional reactions. In contrast to a Christianity drained of its former ambitions, why is it that Islam has not given up its virulent proselytism and instead appears to pose a threat for the future?
This is a threat that de Gaulle already recognized in one of his extraordinary communications to Alain Peyrefitte, when he declared: “We are after all a European people of the white race, Greco-Latin culture, and the Christian religion.” And he considered Algerian independence necessary to prevent his village from being one day renamed “Colombey-the-two-Mosques”—which does not at all mean that he intended to exclude other “races” or religions. He understood France too well to endorse a narrow or xenophobic vision of it.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, January 4, 2021 Jean-Marie Rouart, a prolific French author and, since 1997, a member of the French Academy, published “Secularism is an Illusory Defense against the Islamist Will to Conquer,” in Le Figaro on December 8 and available in English translation here with the author’s permission. While the essay’s starting point is the challenge of Islamism in France and the efforts by the Macron government to address it, it explores a much wider matrix that includes the historical process of secularism, the status of Christianity in France (and, by extension, in the West more broadly), the role of tradition in national identity, and the imperative of the sacred in any culture. This complex array of ideas has implications far beyond France, yet it also indicates how today’s France has become ground zero for the cultural conflicts around secularization, Christianity, and Islam. To understand Rouart’s argument, one needs first to consider this specific context. What makes this topic urgent now?
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By Norbert Bolz · Wednesday, October 7, 2020 Nietzsche once said that culture was only a thin apple peel over a glowing hot chaos. That is probably to say that even a small shock suffices to confront us anew with barbarism and dizzying stupidity. And now we are actually dealing with a worldwide pandemic. In effect, the thin apple peel tore at once and an abyss of the most dangerous folly has opened up. Thus one headline read in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit: “Mankind takes a break—the planet exhales.” One might simply accept as childish impudence calling the lockdown, the curfew that has practically brought the entire global society to a standstill, a “break.” But the madness lies in the presumptuousness of assuming a perspective above humans and of making oneself the voice of the “tortured” earth. Giovanni di Lorenzo, an intelligent, educated man, is the editor-in-chief of that newspaper. But today he evokes Hermann Melville’s captain Benito Cereno: The barbarians have his ship in their hands—and he can do nothing about it.
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