The Legacy of Fear – NYTimes.com

The Legacy of Fear – NYTimes.com.

David Brooks writes about the legacy of communism aft25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Read HERE the very interesting article of Branco Milanovic on which Brooks comments.

David Brooks on Charles Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’

David Brooks

I paste below a few excerpts from an excellent article by David Brooks, in the New York Times, on Charles Taylor’s masterpiece on our secular age.

Taylor’s investigation begins with this question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500, in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?” That is, how did we move from the all encompassing sacred cosmos, to our current world in which faith is a choice, in which some people believe, others don’t and a lot are in the middle?

This story is usually told as a subtraction story. Science came into the picture, exposed the world for the way it really is and people started shedding the illusions of faith. Religious spirit gave way to scientific fact.

Taylor rejects this story. He sees secularization as, by and large, a mottled accomplishment, for both science and faith.

David Brooks on What Makes for a Good President

While travelling these days from Albania to Romania I have found in the New York Times an article of David Brooks, an author whose articles I enjoy more and more (you will find a few links to his articles with a simple search on my blog) about the present presidential debates in the US.

Brooks talks in this article about four traits that someone needs to have in order to be a good president.

The present trouble in which the Romanian Basescu has got himself again, with his usual careless remarks and impromptu interventions in matters outside of his presidential prerogatives made me think that Brooks’s suggestions may also be relevant for Romania.

How mant of these traits do you think are embodied by the Romanian President?

Here they are:

David Brooks on the Limits of Empathy

David Brooks became a New York Times Op-Ed columnist in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” He is the author of “Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” and “On Paradise Drive : How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense,” both published by Simon & Schuster. His most recent book is “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement,” published by Random House in March 2011.

I like a lot David Brooks. He often makes a lot of sense and is of those journalists that are still upholding values at a time when everything becomes relativised. In a recent article in New York Times he does a serious analysis of the much praised, but often overvalued, virtue of empathy. Here are a few excerpts, to motivate you to read the entire article.

David Brooks – ‘Not Falwell, but Stott’

David Brooks

Here are some significant quotes from the editorial dedicated by David Brooks to John Stott in 2004 in New York Times:

…
Falwell and Pat Robertson are held up as spokesmen for evangelicals, which is ridiculous. Meanwhile people like John Stott, who are actually important, get ignored.

It could be that you have never heard of John Stott. I don’t blame you. As far as I can tell, Stott has never appeared on an important American news program. A computer search suggests that Stott’s name hasn’t appeared in this newspaper since April 10, 1956, and it’s never appeared in many other important publications.