Word: creationism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...moment. There is an extraordinary burden that ordinary people endure when they recognize, perhaps after decades of having been submissive, slavelike, that freedom calls for a different set of imperatives, for a certain capacity for individual decision, judgment and action. I also think it's rather important, for the creation of a strong civic culture, for there to have been some type of civic protest or movement that in the worst days of dictatorship bore witness to more humane values. I do not know of any society that will survive as a democracy that does not possess in some fashion...
...first organized a citizens' group, including Soviet dissidents in exile, that went to Madrid in 1980 for the human rights follow-up to the Helsinki agreement. In 1983 I coordinated a study group that led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, of which I was the first president. But I resigned to go into the "private sector" ((to work)) on democracy. I felt -- and feel -- more comfortable designing programs than giving out money...
...unstated thought is that acknowledging evil implies that Satan is coequal with God. Better not to open that door. It leads into the old Manichaean heresy: the world as battleground between the divine and the diabolical, the outcome very much in doubt: "La prima luce," Dante's light of creation, the brilliant ignition of God, against the satanic negation, the candle snuffer. Those uncomfortable with the idea of evil mean this: You don't say that the shadow has the same stature as the light. If you speak of the Dark Lord, of the "dark side of Sinai...
...20th century, Lucretius' shores of light vanished like the coasts of Atlantis, carried under by terrible convulsions. The ascendant civilizations (the Europeans, Americans, Japanese) accomplished horrors that amounted to a usurpation of the power of God over creation. The world in this century went about a work of de-creation -- destroying its own generations in World War I; attempting to extinguish the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust, to destroy the Armenian people, the Ukrainian kulaks and, much later, the Cambodians -- all the reverberating genocides...
Thernstrom criticizes Harvard's creation of an Afro-American studies department. He says that in order to avoid the staffing problems currently faced by the field of concentration, the area of study should have been made a committee. He blames the lack of Afro-American scholars to the PC belief that only Blacks can teach the subject, but only a tiny number of Blacks have taken doctorates in the subject...