Foucault

For those who are fond of Foucault, here’s an interesting review of a recent book on Foucault and his brief foray into journalism during the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Also, if Foucault’s your thing, the Foucault blog is always worth the read.

Update: I forgot to mention, you can read some of what Foucault wrote about Iran here.

Filed under: Foucault, Islam, Philosophy

The world according to who?

I don’t lay claim to any life changing insight about the world. Nor will I tell you ‘this is what I think is wrong’, or ,’If only people would…’. Such statements annoy me actually. However, I would like to suggest that it is important to think about the following issue.

From recent events, and journalism about those events, it would seem that it is important to think about the tensions between contemporary Islam (which is by no means uniform), for want of better words, Western liberal capitalism, and what it is that Christians believe.

All three of these ‘ideas’, (although really they are perhaps more a set of interconnected ideas about the world, the good, evil etc.), have overlapping concerns – the personal (what is the good life?), the political, (how do we govern our communities?), and the spiritual, (who is God? How do we know?).

That there is tension is a real issue for 21st century Australians – as Peter Costello’s recent speech makes clear. How do we live in a multicultural society, truly valuing each other, and yet govern clearly and justly for all.

In an effort to start understanding these thing better, I’ve started reading the last two items on my reading list in the sidebar.

Here is a quote from Hanif Kureishi, (author of The Word and the Bomb). I would like your thoughts:
“For us, religious commitment, particularly if it was political too, entailed not an emancipation but a rejection of the enlightenment and of modernity. How could we begin to do deal with it?”

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Filed under: Christian, Islam, Politics