Free Republic

A few years ago, Robert Reilly wrote a book that may offer the key to understanding the advance of Islamic terror against the West: The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. At the heart of Reilly’s book is his argument that the “denigration of dialogue is due to the demotion of reason that took place in the ninth-century struggle between the rationalist theologians, the Mu’tazilites and their anti-rationalist theologians, the Ash’arites. Unfortunately, for those who prefer dialogue, the Ash’arites won.” “The Ash’arites’ position was that reason is so infected by men’s self-interest...

Apple's iBooks platform is seeing an average of a million new users per week after the company's decision to ship iOS 8 with the app pre-installed, according to Apple Director of iBooks Keith Moerer, who spoke today at the Digital Book World Conference. efore iOS 8, the iBooks app had to be searched for and downloaded from the App Store, putting it on par with several other App Store-based e-books apps like Amazon's Kindle app for iOS. Pre-installing iBooks made it "so easy" for new users to try iBooks for the first time, said Moerer. Family Sharing, also new in...

Author’s Note: If you’re wondering why this column begins with “#4” just go to my archive. This is Part II of a series. Part I described a new College Prep Course that is being offered by www.CrossExamined.org. Frank Turek, J. Warner Wallace, and I will be traveling the country offering the course starting in the summer of 2015. This column series provides an overview of my 10-step plan to help Christian kids prepare for life in college. 4. Google Is Not a Friend to Higher Ed. Some readers may remember my infamous “letter to Ed” that went viral on the...

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it...

Oxford University Press Bans Use Of Pig, Sausage Or Pork-Related Words To Avoid Offending Muslims 14 Jan 2015 The Oxford University Press has warned its writers not to mention pigs, sausages or pork-related words in children's books, in an apparent bid to avoid offending Jews and Muslims. The existence of the publisher's guidelines emerged after a radio discussion on free speech in the wake of the Paris attacks. Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, presenter Jim Naughtie said: "I've got a letter here that was sent out by OUP to an author doing something for young people. "Among the things...

More abject surrender and dhimmitude from Ludicrous Britannia. OUP says they are avoiding mentioning pork and pigs in books to avoid offending Muslims and Jews, but Jews have never taken offense at such things — it was only in Saudi Arabia, for example, that censors covered over a pig character in a children’s book with a big black marker. “Oxford University Press bans mention of pork and pigs in books to ‘avoid offending Muslims or Jews,'” by Ewan Palmer, International Business Times, January 14, 2015 (thanks to Lookmann): "One of the biggest education publishers in the world has warned its...

Laura Ingalls Wilder is legendary. Her "Little House on the Prairie" series, based on her family's adventures on the Midwestern frontier, have sold more than 41 million copies in the U.S. and have been translated into more than 40 languages. The books spawned a long-running television show and, in 2008, a stage musical. Millions of readers have been captivated by Wilder's childhood on the prairie, but her newest book, "Pioneer Girl," released more than 50 years after her death, offers a new perspective. Annotated with exceptional detail by Pamela Smith Hill, "Pioneer Girl" is Wilder's autobiography, unpublished until now. Hill's...

Michel Houellebecq, who first stirred controversy with sex novel Atomised, makes waves with book describing country after Islamist becomes president. Put France’s literary enfant terrible together with Europe’s most combustible political talking point, and sparks were always going to fly. Michel Houellebecq, whose tale of sex, mother-hatred and cloning Atomised was the French literary scandal of the Nineties, is turning his attention to “Islamisation”. His new novel Soumission (Submission), will not be published until January 7 but has already triggered a flurry of accusations that he is pandering to the growing Islamophobia gripping France. It is set in 2022 and...

The late Philip K. Dick, born 86 years ago today in Chicago, is something of a cautionary figure in American literature: brilliant, prolific, often sloppy, and woefully underappreciated during his lifetime. It was only with the 1982 release of the film "Blade Runner" (loosely based on his 1968 novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") that Dick's work truly began to saturate the mainstream; by that point, he had been dead for four months. In the ensuing three decades, Dick's novels and stories have served as fodder for dozens of Hollywood movies; they have been reissued again and again. In...

This year, Christmas shopping may be an especially welcome respite from the ugly events going on across the country, as mobs take to the streets because grand juries that examined evidence reached different conclusions from those reached by mobs who made up their minds without examining that evidence. Perhaps more than in other years, shopping malls can become shopping mauls. One of the ways to make Christmas shopping less stressful is to give books as presents — after ordering them on the Internet. There is a good crop of new books to choose from this year, as well as some...

Consistent with our analysis of last year’s list, the New York Times has again apparently excluded any conservative or even right-leaning titles from its “100 Notable Books” of 2014. A disclaimer: While “conservative” or “right-leaning” are obviously subjective terms, a cursory glance at the Times’ list indicates books that lack a focus on individual liberty, free enterprise, traditional values, or many of the other tenets of Western civilization — unless critical of such tenets; further, the list is bereft of any titles authored by conservative or right-leaning authors. To give you a sense as to the kind of narratives/themes echoed...

I'm well into my 70s and checking off an item on my bucket list is finally getting around to reading Ulysses by James Joyce. It was never assigned reading in high school or college (I went to a Christian school, which may be one of the reasons). So, at my advanced age, I'm attempting at long last to tackle this work.I have a long attention span and am not easily bored nor discouraged. I've read long, involved books and have found most of them gripping, such as The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Faust by Goethe and Crime and Punishment...

Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas, Rush and Kathryn Limbaugh, for returning to America’s children, parents and grandparents the best gift of them all--pride in America’s noble history! Not since Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has a figure from childlore done so much to lead the little people out of the fog. We look for Rudolph every Christmas, before packing him away with the ornaments til’ the next holiday season. But ‘Liberty’, the lovable, time-traveling horse of the ‘Rush Revere Adventures’ series is there every day. Liberty is not just the equine hero who makes going to bed a delight before lights...

The 19th Century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote about characters who justified murder in the name of their ideological beliefs. For this reason, John Gray argues, he's remained relevant ever since, through the rise of the totalitarian states of the 20th Century, to the "war against terror". When Fyodor Dostoyevsky described in his novels how ideas have the power to change human lives, he knew something of what he was writing about. Born in 1821, the Russian writer was in his 20s when he joined a circle of radical intellectuals in St Petersburg who were entranced by French utopian socialist...

On April 30, 1995, William S. Lind published an op ed in The Washington Post that foresaw a future breakup of the United States, driven by multiculturalism. The piece described not only America’s second civil war, but also a recovery of our traditional, Western, Christian culture. That cultural and moral recovery was led by a new country located in the northeast, which named itself Victoria because it had returned to Victorian values. Mr. Lind’s op ed has since been turned into a book, Victoria: A Novel of Fourth Generation War, by “Thomas Hobbes,” the well-known theorist of the state and...

By the time John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for his great American novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, he had been dead for 12 years. Toole reportedly killed himself in part due to years of frustration over unsuccessful attempts to get his outrageously funny book about New Orleans published. It was only after his mother browbeat author Walker Percy into taking up the cause that Louisiana State University Press published the book in 1980. The following year, it won the Pulitzer for fiction. It went from being considered a cult classic to a must-read: More than 1.5 million copies...

Mark Crutcher, head of Life Dynamics, wrote a well researched and powerful book called Lime 5: Exploited by Choice.The book compiles stories of abortion complications and deaths. Crutcher draws material from court records, published sources, and firsthand accounts. Often, stories of abortion malpractice are hidden because abortion related injuries and deaths very rarely make the news. There is generally no legal requirement for clinics to report complications; doing so is voluntary. And since drawing attention to botched abortions is not in the clinics’ best interests, there is very little motivation for clinics to report their mistakes to the CDC. Women...

My Dragonfly And Me If I could be a Dragon Fly and wing my way through the sky I would never be shy just me and my Dragon Fly! By moonlight we ride the wind chase the comets tail for fun by day we would hide from the sun our fragile wings would come undone On darkest nights we would use fireflies as our guide we would dip and we would glide through the heavens open wide and scatter diamonds in the night sky my Dragon Fly and me... And we would wing past our lovers silent in the...

Are you looking for a spellbinding novel with deeply Catholic themes, compelling characters, and exquisite prose? Well, if you’ve been confining your search to Barnes and Noble’s family-friendly Christian fiction shelf, I’m here to tell you that you’re missing out. As a reader, you have probably heard of Dean Koontz. He has sold 450 million copies of his books in 38 languages, making him one of the most successful writers in the world. And while his stories have been categorized as science fiction, fantasy, thriller, and horror, he’s also considered by many readers to be the world’s best Catholic author...