Law. Faith. Justice. Community. Culture.
The Daesh plays on fear to undermine our liberal democratic values and fracture our societies. And people in the U.S. and France are falling right into their trap.
Continue reading “Daesh (ISIS / ISIL), Terrorism & Ideology”
In Peter Singer’s 2009 book The Life You Can Save [1] and 2015 book, The Most Good You Can Do, [2] he makes moral arguments on why people in richer nations should donate money to charities to end poverty in developing nations. He is a proponent of Effective Altruism, the idea that people in rich nations should give their disposable income to charities through evidence-based processes to ensure maximum positive impact.
Continue reading “Peter Singer and Effective Altruism: What’s Wrong?”
I hurried through a tiny, litter-peppered park enclosed within an HDB precinct. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed someone walking towards me. A cleaner–broom in hand, South Asian descent. I hastened. He slowed to a stop. He looked past me. I threw a furtive glance in that direction. There was a domestic helper with a toddler in her arms, fair as morn. The toddler was smiling. At the man. She waved animatedly at him. Eyes twinkled. The man hesitated. Then he sheepishly waved back at the child.
We paused: the man, the woman and I.
The moment passed when finally, the child turned to look at the playground some distance away. Our fellowship dispersed. I slowly left that tiny budding garden, my heart blooming a thousand golden petals.
“When philosophy has gained the truth of which it is capable, it passes into politics and prayer, politics through which the world is changed, prayer through which men ask God to complete the change of the world by carrying them into His presence and giving them what, left to themselves, they would always lack.”
“And, as the reader might have discerned by now, I do believe in God and in the higher knowledge that cannot be ours. And that explains why I believe that Unger (or any other theorist) cannot postulate an even close to perfect theory. That this is so is demonstrated by the complex mesh of critique and counter-critique that have, as their central focus, the influential theory or theories of the day. Indeed, Unger himself believed that to be so in Knowledge and Politics, although his present views are rather less obvious. I see nothing terribly frightening in this acknowledgment of the fallibility of human knowledge which we nevertheless continue to use whilst functioning as human beings. It also mandates a humility which has, in any event, always been the hallmark of the great scholars of our time.”
The program of radical democracy has a more troubled relation to the strengthening and cleansing of solidarity. The fulfillment of its proposals does not ensure us of coexisting in peace. It does not take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. But it does enable us to live out more fully the tense, ambiguous, ennobling connection between solidarity and the development of our faculties, between our longing for one another and our efforts to find particular expressions for the impulse within us that rebels against all particularity. What more could we ask of society than a better chance to be both great and sweet?
A place may be physical and felt by the textures and contours of its physical embodiment: see Textures of Hanoi. A place is also unique by the culture which takes root and grows in it, and the people who consciously and unwittingly shape that culture, a sort of institutional memory of the people who inhabit that space. It is, I think, inevitable that the unique physical geography of the place forms part of the contours of the people’s social milieu.
A waterfall in a hilly countryside, for instance, is not merely a geographical feature or attraction, but the locus in which people make a livelihood, and find communion. The beautiful limestone caves in the islands of Ha Long Bay are not merely economic resources but the dotted edges of a vast oceanic home of the sea nomads. Their children somersault into the water like fish spinning out of the sea. And there are the H’mong and Dao people (and other ethnic minority groups) at Sa Pa who journey everyday to the resort town donned in their distinctively coloured ethnic costumes in hope of dignified economic transactions with tourists. The elderly traveller who begins his day early by reading the newspapers and eating pho along a quiet street in the city. And the occasional tourist who is forced to take shelter in the generous hut of a corn farmer as they watch the rain fall, the rain which fall on all peoples, without distinction of economic status, country, language or ethnicity.
They are the people who make Hanoi.
Check out the rest of the photos here.
The essence of relations between people is communication. In March 2015 I wrote can article on how civil dialogue should be the procedure, process and point for Christians living as salt and light of the world in the public square, such a paradigm being grounded in and motivated by a respect for the imago dei in every person. The main points to this are as follows:
1. Civil dialogue is conversation between persons in a way which respects every participant and which seeks understanding.
2. The public square is thus the space freely accessible to the local community in which the life of the community occurs–where members of the community dialogue, and where truth and wisdom ought to prevail for justice and righteousness to flourish.
3. We can be salt and light in or with the public square:
4. The ethics of dialogue is just as important as the subject matter of the dialogue.
Check out the full article here.
In the year when little rain fell
and the wind brought burnt wood instead,
grass fields were parched into barren deserts;
elderly trees searched deep for life;
the earth kept waiting to be made good –
the earth kept waiting for good.