Dr Paul Allen

St Mary Coptic Orthodox Church (Photo credit: Christopher Chan ) When it comes to Jesus , the gullibility of the religious academy and its media know no bounds. This past Easter , the U.S. media buzzed with excitement over the announcement of an ancient Coptic (Egyptian) papyrus fragment with the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife….’” One more footnote for the story of how a powerful ecclesiastical elite suppressed the diversity of Christian voices and made its own variation “orthodoxy.” Harvard Divinity School has long been a place where “alternative Christianities”—especially Gnosticism —are defended with “fundamentalist” zeal. Karen L. King , Hollis Professor of Divinity , has been a distinguished evangelist for this “other Christianity.” Properly skeptical journalists might have paused before rushing to the keyboards and cameras. Not with this story. I saw headlines with words like “Certain,” “Confident,” and “Proved.” No question about it: the fragment is authentic and de...

English: Sigmund Freud (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The collapse of the barrier between popular culture and decadence has released a toxic mudslide of vulgarity into the nation’s family rooms—and just about everywhere else. There is almost no remote corner of this culture that is not marked by the toleration of vulgarity, or the outright celebration of depravity. Lee Siegel has seen this reality, and he doesn’t like it. “When did the culture become so coarse?,” he asks, adding: “It’s a question that quickly gets you branded as either an unsophisticated rube or some angry culture warrior.” Siegel wants us all to know that he is neither unsophisticated nor a culture warrior. In his recent feature essay in The Wall Street Journal , “ America the Vulgar,” Siegel recites his cultural bona fides. As he relates, “I miss a time when there were powerful imprecations instead of mere obscenity—or at least when sexual innuendo , because it was innuendo, served as a delicious release of tensi...

Image via Wikipedia Are Chinese mothers superior? Amy Chua clearly believes so, and her argument has just as clearly caught the attention of the American public. Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , has made  The New York Time s bestseller list for the past ten weeks. This mom struck a raw nerve. Chua, the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School , fired her first shot with a column published in the  Wall Street Journal   entitled, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” It was a shot heard around the world — especially by other moms. The uproar followed immediately — and no wonder. Chua accused Western mothers of being lax and undemanding, and therefore producing underachieving children. She began her column with these incendiary lines: “A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether th...