1+ week, 2+ hour ago (239+ words) Academic pariah he may be, but on the big questions Charles Murray is a man of his time. Science, he believed for most of his life, had demolished the traditional notion of God. Consciousness is produced by the brain, nothing more. The Gospels are less history than folklore. I was born three generations after Murray, and on the other side of the Atlantic, but everything about his materialist assumptions is immediately recognizable to me; it has simply been the default setting of any educated person since at least the First World War. All of which just goes to show that history has more unexpected, out-of-the-blue twists than any crime novel. Gradually and then suddenly, the burden of proof has recently shifted, to the point where it is atheist materialists who have begun to stammer and evade the obvious question, and…...

3+ week, 2+ hour ago (1386+ words) One of the stranger moments in the history of American popular music occurred in the winter of 1986, when the chorus of the hottest song on the pop charts featured Greek lyrics from a Christian prayer. Teenagers speeding with their friends rolled down their windows, let the wind blow their Aqua Netted hair, and yelled, "Kyrie Eleison'Lord have mercy'down the road that I must travel! At keg parties in fraternities and sororities across the land, college students sang, in the native language of their social organizations, "Lord have mercy through the darkness of the night. And while it's true that many of the song's fans probably thought they were singing "carry a laser, Mr. Mister's "Kyrie Eleison topped the Billboard 100 for two consecutive weeks. As Tom Breihan describes it, the hit pop song is "a textbook example of ambiguous worship music....