Marginal Christianity

  21 Oct, 2014 Carl Raschke 0 Comments Current Events In his best-selling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin, 2011), popular science author Jared Diamond meticulously and relentlessly plunges into a wide variety of historical case studies using what he terms the “comparative method” in order to answer the question that has preoccupied scholars from Edward Gibbon through Oswald Spengler – why do societies decline and ultimately disappear? Diamond makes it clear that he is not a “determinist,” particularly one of the ecological variety, although he does stress environmental issues, even in his earlier publishing writings, in an outsize way. As the title of the book implies, history is in many respects like a game of cards....

http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/democracy-no-longer-to-come/ 13 May, 2014   Carl Raschke   1 Comment   Current Events Or, Why Western Intellectuals Must Be Quickly Wakened from Their Dogmatic Political Slumber  The international crisis in Ukraine, combined with the precipitous and aggressive behavior of Russia toward the West, the docility of Europe and the fecklessness of American foreign policy in shaping events, has prompted after-midnight calls among many international experts for a radical and rapid rethinking of what the word “globalization” really means, or what it might look like even in the next five years. The various commentators, political theorists, and policy architects at  Foreign Policy  magazine, in particular, have been more than forthright in triggering the emergency alarm system with regard to what they perceive as a general failure on the part of Western leaders and the broader cognoscenti to recognize that a mass...