Word: morale
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When England's Andrew Flintoff broke away from celebrations to console Brett Lee in the aftermath of last year's thrilling Second Test at Edgbaston, his gesture spoke as eloquently about Australia's moral limitations as it did of his own decency. Had the roles been reversed, would any of Ponting's men have done the same? In exchanges unseen or forgotten, Australian players since 1995 may have performed comparable acts. But the fact that Flintoff's gesture received so much attention suggests cricket fans are more familiar with displays of Australian triumphalism...
Islam played a particular role--as both a threat and a model--in the drama that probably lies closest to Benedict's heart: the secularization of Christian Europe. In the same 1996 book, he wrote that "the Islamic soul reawakened" in reaction to the erosion of the West's moral stature during the 1960s. Ratzinger paraphrased that soul's new song: "We know who we are; our religion is holding its ground; you don't have one any longer. We have a moral message that has existed without interruption since the prophets, and we will tell the world...
...deliberately trying to raise the temperature. Many analysts, especially in Rome, think he knew exactly what he was saying and regard the Islamic section of the 35-min. speech as a brave and eloquent warning of Islam's inherent violence and of a faithless West's inability to offer moral response. Yet Benedict's argument was slapdash and flawed. His sage, Ibn Hazm, turned out to have belonged to a school with no current adherents, and although reason's primacy is debated in Islam, it is very much part of the culture that developed algebra. Paleologus' forced-conversion accusation misrepresents...
...their fates with the Koran's verses on their lips, it invites questions about Islam's credentials as a religion that is willing to police its own claims of peace and tolerance. As conservative Catholic scholar Michael Novak points out, the Vatican's pacifism gives Benedict unmatched moral standing to press this point. "Being against war, he can say tougher things ... than any President or Prime Minister can. His role is to represent Western civilization...
...either side to maneuver. People asked to flatly renounce their Holy Writ generally don't. And Benedict has little give--because first, he seldom says anything he is not prepared to defend to the bitter end and second, if he retreats now, he risks being accused of the same moral relativism that he rails against...