talk of the past -- firefly article

Talk of the Past
http://www.common-place.org/vol-03/no-02/talk/
Reckoning
Jill Lepore

"As long as we have a politics of race in America," historian David Blight writes in his prize-winning study, Race and Reunion (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), "we will have a politics of Civil War memory." A pretty impoverished politics, apparently, since the need for reconciliation led white Americans, North and South, to remember the war but forget that it was about slavery. "The inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race," Blight argues, which goes a long way toward explaining the self-bloating Civil War re-enactors, Scarlett O'Hara impersonators, and dewy-eyed Dixie defenders journalist Tony Horwitz portrayed in his Confederates in the Attic (New York, 1998). And now–hold onto your hoop skirt and grab your space helmet–the Lost Cause has been taken up in outer space.
( Read more... )

cs lewis -- the case for christianity

But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you've taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

The Case For Christianity