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Jul 30, 2024 | 
freethinker.co.uk | Adam Wakeling
The seventeenth century did not get off to a great start in Europe. Religious conflict still simmered, and in 1618, the continent became embroiled in the bloodiest and most destructive war it would suffer before the two World Wars. The Netherlands was fighting for its independence. In Britain, the dispute between King and Parliament led to wars costing hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1640s and 1650s. Scientific progress faced massive barriers.
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Jul 3, 2024 | 
freethinker.co.uk | Adam Wakeling
Books sometimes have a way of turning up at opportune times. In mid-2022 a collection of essays on the themes of blasphemy and violence in Europe, Demystifying the Sacred: Blasphemy and Violence from the French Revolution to Today, went off to the printers.
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Jul 2, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Dave Thompson |Jonathan Kay |Iona Italia |Adam Wakeling
A review of 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left by Robyn Hitchcock, 224 pages, Constable (June 2024)He’s never had a major hit, he’s never been awarded a gold record, and he’ll probably never get into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. His best-known video never existed, and through the 1980s, he sold almost as many records in America, where they were never even released, as he did in his UK homeland.
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Jul 1, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Iona Italia |Adam Wakeling |Brian Stewart |Charlotte Allen
A close friend withdrew from public life a few years ago, after a brief but very productive career as a writer and speaker. Her good sense and committed liberal values had brought her many, many fans, but she was tormented by the small minority of people who responded to her work with deliberate distortions of her words and vicious and petty attacks on her character. The avalanche of support she received couldn’t bury those few determinedly nasty trolls.
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Jun 30, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Pamela Paresky |Adam Wakeling |Brian Stewart |Charlotte Allen
This interview was conducted by Pamela Paresky in Israel in February 2024. Pamela Paresky: Given the current events, I wanted to start by asking you about Navalny. What do you think happened? Natan Sharansky: Putin killed Navalny. Whether he did it by poisoning him, or he did it by beating him to death, or simply through permanently keeping him in a punishing cell, and it was slow. It does not matter.
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Jun 30, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Adam Wakeling |Brian Stewart |Charlotte Allen |Aaron Sarin
If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all. ~C.S. Lewis C.S. Lewis is the best-known Christian apologist of the twentieth century. He devoted decades to producing books, articles, speeches, and radio addresses that aim to persuade readers and listeners that Christianity is true.
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Feb 23, 2024 | 
arcdigital.media | Adam Wakeling
Here are some headlines from the last couple of months. Donald Trump won the New Hampshire Republican primary, all but securing his party’s nomination for the November election. Tucker Carlson traveled to Moscow to give a softball interview to Russian leader Vladmir Putin, who tried to justify his indefensible invasion of Ukraine with a meandering dissertation on Russian history.
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Jan 30, 2024 | 
freethinker.co.uk | Adam Wakeling
‘That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me’ wrote C. S. Lewis of his conversion to Christianity in Surprised By Joy. ‘In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.’ Like most new Christians, Lewis converted because he had become convinced of the truth of the Scriptures and felt a connection with the God of the Bible.
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Nov 16, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Robert Huddleston |Josh Allan |Adam Wakeling
A review of Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell, 464 pages, Penguin Random House (March 2023). “Humanism,” Sarah Bakewell tells us, “is a semantic cloud of meanings and implications.” As a philosophy, humanism encompasses the intellectual and cultural legacy of the Renaissance, humanitarianism, liberalism, atheism, and agnosticism, and the objects and methods of study of a loosely affiliated set of academic disciplines.
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Nov 15, 2023 | 
quillette.com | Josh Allan |Adam Wakeling |Greg Koabel
A review of Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements by Anthony Burgess, 416 pages, W.W. Norton (October 2014). Napoleon Bonaparte died in 1821, but it has taken until 2023 for Hollywood to produce a definitive biopic of the man who came closer than anyone else to conquering the European continent. One could argue that the story was just waiting for the right director; that Ridley Scott is to cinema what Bonaparte is to world history.
