[FRA:] Russell Berman kisses the Pope's ring

[Ralph Dumain]

The Pope and Jihad:
"Cultural Dialogue" and the Islamic Response
to Benedict's Regensburg Address
September 15, 2006
http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=140

See also:

TELOS 137:
The Limits of Modernity
by Russell Berman
http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=177

>The cultural legacy of the past can be heavy with inertia, but it 
>can also draw on an organic vibrancy that can intrude abruptly into 
>the up-to-date illusions of reason.

Berman should be horsewhipped.


TELOS 138:
Love, Law, and Liberty
March 26, 2007
http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=184

The political issues of the 2006 elections are seen to be 
deceptive.  The real enemy, bureaucracy, is still in the saddle.

>This is where the discussion developed over years in this journal 
>becomes pertinent. Stepping away from the media circus of the 
>national public sphere and the tedious minutiae of policy debates, 
>we recognize how the political question of the day remains the 
>standing of the bureaucratic state, its implications for society and 
>the sorts of lives we can lead. Some of Telos's concerns derive from 
>the tradition of Weber's critique of bureaucracy, its deadening 
>impact on human creativity, and its imperviousness to genuine change 
>except through religious or para-religious movements: prophets and 
>charismatic leaders. Some of this derives however from Husserl and 
>the phenomenological critique of a modernity that reduced life to a 
>naturalistic accumulation of mere facts, data points, the combined 
>accuracy of which only produced ignorance by occluding the beckoning 
>and elusive horizons that signal the potentials of humanity. A 
>further source is the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School, part of 
>the wider self-critique of Marxism that transpired in the 
>mid-twentieth century, as well as the critique of the oppressive 
>character of the Soviet regime and its bureaucracy, rediscovered in 
>the structure of the bureaucratic regimes of the West. However 
>complexly these strands of thought have intertwined, the central 
>question remains, how to safeguard creativity, the human pursuit of 
>a constantly rearticulated telos, against the lethal grip of 
>bureaucratic power and the dead embrace of reification.

What a crock!  Critical theory in the service of the right-wing.