Commentary on the rise of the secular world, the whisper, happy birthday Karl, and the key to Canada's suvival.

Thinking about what secular is.

youtube -- The Future of the Secular
Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, McGill University treats the term "secular" with several different meanings.

Related.

Pdf below -- The Place of Religion in a Secular Age

 

Guardian -- Is that all there is?
Charles Taylor examines our attempts to fill the God-shaped hole left by the death of belief in his weighty tome A Secular Age, says Stuart Jeffries

 

New York Times -- The Godless Delusion
We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,” the Russian critic Belinsky once shouted across the table at Turgenev, “and you want to eat!”

Joseph Campbell has argued that religions evolve to embrace what humans know. The new Cosmists.

The Atlantic -- The Holy Cosmos: The New Religion of Space Exploration
Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson are high priests, astronauts are like saints that ascend into heaven, and extraterrestrials are as gods -- benevolent, wise, and capable of manipulating space and time.

The struggle for China’s soul. Thanks to Ken of Tokyo/Hong Kong.

Foreign Policy -- The Revenge of Wen Jiabao
The ouster of Chongqing boss Bo Xilai was 30 years in the making -- a long, sordid tale of elite families and factions vying for the soul of the Chinese Communist Party.

What Obama and Medvedev were whispering about. Thanks to Tony of Victoria.

Dawn -- N-bomb and terrorists
WE have just had the second Nuclear Security Summit, in Seoul. It got surprisingly little attention from the international media although 53 countries attended it.

What would Karl Marx make of capitalism today.

London Review of Books -- Marx at 193
In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist.

How Trudeau made Quebec 'independent in a strong Canada' according to Conard Black. (ed's note -- there is nothing like living in the United States to see what makes Canada work).

National Post -- Trudeau's master stroke
As a guest of the American people, my deliveries of the National Post - late and sporadic as they are - comprise my principal connection, here in the tenebrous, alligator-infested thickets of Florida, with Canadian public policy discussion.

Quote worth quoting.

“This is the genius of the Trudeau formula: It was proportionate …. It is, yet again, the confirmation of historian W.L. Morton's description of Canada as a country "strong in moderation and governable only by compromise."