Wheel of the Year

Here, within this circle, we shall learn the dance of the Lady, Mother of all things, and her beloved, the Lord of Death and Resurrection.

This dance is ancient beyond time, yet eternally new. It is the dance of atoms and of particles that flicker in and out of existence in a wink. It is the dance of the sun and the moon. It is the stately dance of galaxies in their courses. It is the birth and death of our universe itself - the breath of the Gods. This is the unbroken circle, the Wheel of the Year. The circle is never broken, and its movement is never-ending.

....

The tale of the Lord and Lady is told again and again by every voice in all of time and space. Everything in the universe, from the largest to the smallest, relates the story in its own way and its own time. Their story rings across space and time, and in all the worlds that spin their way through eternity.

We shall follow this dance, in its many intricate steps. Indeed, we shall see this dance as many different dances, woven together into a tapestry of space and time, of light and life, and of mystery. We shall follow the story of birth and growth, of discovery and mastery, of age, ripeness, and decay. We shall pursue the twin mysteries of death and resurrection, and of love, without which none of the other mysteries would take place.

(From the introduction)

Wheel of the Year - Now an e-book

The Wheel of the Year

This book is an exploration of the Wiccan Wheel of the year – the eight festivals of the year. This started out as a series of essays on The Witches' Voice. When I printed them out for a friend who was asking about Wiccan holidays, I realized I had the makings of a book.

The book is now available for Kindle users.

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By the way, you don't have to buy the physical device. You can download a reader for your computer.

Book Review: ?Why Are Jews Liberals?? - WSJ.com

Book Review: Why Are Jews Liberals? - WSJ.com

I'm listed on Amazon

Wow! My book has been selected for listing on Amazon!

Well, I suspect that's become the default option for all books published through Lulu, but it's kind of nice to see it become an option.

Book recommendation

Reading

A couple of weekends ago, I was at the Dr. Who convention in town, and snagged a few books from the Dealers' Room. I've been a bit under the weather, so I've been doing more sleeping than reading. But I'm finally starting to catch up on reading.

Christianity and Law

Featured over at Concurring Opinions...

A splendid new book edited by John Witte and Christianity and Law: An Introduction (Cambridge Companions to Religion), seeks to recover the deep and nuanced connections between Christian social theory and Western jurisprudence. Unlike many polemical works written by today's battling theonomists and strict separationists, Christianity and Law doesn't dwell on defining founding myths about America and its original status as either a religious "city on a hill" or a walled garden in which enlightened rationalists could feel safe from the Church. Most of the essays in Christanity and Law dig deeper into the Jewish, Roman and medieval roots of Christian jurisprudence.

Gutenberg.de

Gutenberg at Der Spiegel

A review of "Liberal Fascism"

A dissenting view

As many predicted from the title, Goldberg does not content himself with rebuking those who call anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. Instead, he invents reasons of his own for calling anyone who disagrees with Jonah Goldberg a fascist. Liberal Fascism confirms anew George Orwell’s remark—cited by Goldberg without irony—that fascism has no meaning today other than “something not desirable.

...one can make out three reasons for calling liberals the true fascists. First, Goldberg points out that liberalism and fascism have many elements in common. Both fascists and liberals favor a minimum wage, an expansive social safety net, heavy regulation of industry, and redistributive taxation, but stop short of advocating the abolition of private property. Both scorn constitutional limits on government, indulge in economic populism, and see the working classes as their natural constituencies. Both distrust bourgeois values and traditional religion. On these points and others, Goldberg observes, not only do liberalism and fascism agree, but they reject the ideology of the American conservative movement.

That liberalism and fascism happen to overlap is not surprising. One can find just as many similarities between fascism and movement conservatism: both assail communism, exaggerate security threats, rationalize wars of aggression, and uphold nationalism (what sentimentalists call patriotism) and its symbols (flags, founding myths, worship of national heroes). Nothing in logic compels the ideas of liberalism, fascism, or movement conservatism to cohere into a system. On the contrary, creative theorists can mix sundry political ideas as freely as the ingredients of a cocktail. Given the vast range of questions to which competing ideologies purport to provide answers, the real surprise would be if any two ideologies had nothing in common at all.

Goldberg nonetheless sees ideologies as discrete wholes. He makes much of his discovery, for example, that the Nazis supported organic farming and animal rights and even goes so far as to admonish us to “grapple with the fact that we’ve seen this sort of thing before.” Readers can spare themselves the energy. That Nazism and contemporary liberalism both promote healthy living is as meaningless a finding as that bloody marys and martinis may both be made with gin. Repeatedly, Goldberg fails to recognize a reductio ad absurdum. He tells us that Himmler bemoaned the Christian persecution of witches, just like Wiccan feminists do today, that Hitler once described his doctrine as “reality-based,” just like today’s progressives describe theirs, and that Mussolini was quite smart “by the standards of liberal intellectuals today.” In no case does Goldberg uncover anything more ominous than a coincidence.

He’s right, of course. Many liberals do impute nefarious designs to conservatives. With just a modicum of restraint, Goldberg could have written a very good book. “Look,” he could have said, “‘Fascism’ has no meaning today, but, in any case, not only does conservatism owe nothing to fascism, but, historically, conservatives in America generally opposed fascism while liberals and leftists often were sympathetic.” Instead, lacking even the excuse of ignorance, he chose to sling the term “fascism” around as casually as the most vulgar leftist. It does not speak well of Goldberg that, by his own admission, he wrote his first book not to enlighten but to exact revenge.

Liberal Fascism completes Goldberg’s transformation from chipper humorist into humorless ideologue. Perhaps it was hubris that made him do it. The last important book by a conservative was Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987, whose ideas had been in circulation for many years before. Goldberg may have convinced himself that by penning yet another disquisition into the “true nature of liberalism,” he could become the first movement conservative in a generation to write something lasting. In the end, he succeeded only in recycling 60 years worth of conservative movement bromides.

Liberal Fascism: Review by Arnold Kling

Jonah Goldberg's Revisionist F-Bomb
By Arnold Kling on 23 Jan 2008

Reviewing Goldberg's book is difficult. I would argue that it is many books, written by an author with Multiple Personality Disorder. There is Goldberg the revisionist historian, Goldberg the outraged conservative child, and Goldberg the troll.

In contemporary jargon, a troll is someone who posts a taunt on a web site in an attempt to get under the skin of his opponents. His goals are to draw attention to himself and to enjoy the anger and discomfort that he arouses. The troll appears in various places in Liberal Fascism, most notably in the title and the cover art, which shows a smiling face with a Hitler mustache.

The outraged conservative child is tired of being blamed all the time while his liberal sibling gets away with everything. He writes (p. 118)

In the liberal telling...there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds; conservatives and "America" writ large...one will virtually never hear that the Palmer raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for. Meanwhile, real or alleged "conservative" misdeeds--say, McCarthyism--are always the exclusive fault of conservatives...[Liberals] feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making...but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

The outraged conservative child probably helped motivate Goldberg to write the book, and the troll could serve to motivate more people to read the book. However, my view would be that the troll and the outraged conservative child detract from the message of the revisionist historian.

Where does fascism come from? Consider these possibilities.

(1) It comes from the personality defects of individual leaders, such as Hitler.

(2) It is a demon lurking within capitalism, which can emerge whenever there is a crisis that weakens liberal-progressives.

(3) It is the unintended consequence of liberal socialism (Hayek's Road to Serfdom).

(4) It is the desired end state envisioned by ideological theoreticians, including not only Benito Mussolini but progressives of the World War I era.

Too many people fall back on (1), which in my view reflects the fundamental attribution error. For example, the best-selling novel The Kite-Runner depicts a Taliban leader as the stereotypical schoolyard bully grown up. The banality of evil. No ideology or connection with Islamic theology to see here. Move along.

Instead of accepting (1), Goldberg treats fascism as an ideological phenomenon. He tries to debunk (2) while drawing attention to (4).

The most effective chapter is "Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism." Goldberg catches Wilson, Herbert Croly (the founder of The New Republic), Walter Lippmann, and other famous progressives of the World War I era with their hands in the fascist cookie jar. They preferred efficient government to democratic government, undertook severe repression of dissent (on p. 117, Goldberg writes "Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it has been estimated that some 175,000 Americans were arrested"), and saw a need for the ordinary individual to be manipulated, educated, and constrained by an elite cadre aiming for national greatness. Above all, they saw war and military conscription as a positive force for molding citizenship and speeding the pace of progress.

Should today's Left be held accountable for the errors and excesses of the Wilsonian era? Perhaps not, but in that case John Hope Franklin should not hold white Americans accountable for the errors and excesses of our history.

Book recommendations

Here are some links to books I'm sending out for Christmas: