* The backstory on the Ukraine can be found in Timothy Snyder's "Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine" (ht)
* Angela Roothaan discusses the recent movie about Hannah Arendt.
* Charlie Huenemann on Leibniz's foray into the field of mine engineering.
* Sayeh Meisami on the great Persian philosopher, Mulla Sadra.
* A recent fatwa apparently claims that going to Mars is not acceptable under Islamic law. It's worth pointing out, perhaps, that while fatwas are authoritative, they are not definitive; their authority is that of a legal opinion, and you can have conflicting fatwas from different authorities. Most Muslims online, at least, seem to find this one more amusing than anything.
* The McGrews have in recent months been talking about undesigned coincidences in evidential assessment of texts:
Tim McGrew at "Christian Apologetics Alliance"
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Lydia McGrew at "What's Wrong with the World"
What We're Reading: Horae Paulinae
* In comments recently, Lucian of Samosata's Double Indictment came up recently, since it's a Menippean satire about Menippean satire. As I mentioned there, Menippean satire is a philosophical genre (Menippus was a Cynic philosopher, and historically the genre has been used as a way of handling matters suitable neither to more traditional dialogues nor to treatises). If you want the basic idea of how Menippean satire works, this is the best source.
* George Demacopoulos discusss, from an Orthodox perspective, what caused the sacramental rupture between East and West.
* Enbrethiliel at "Shredded Cheddar" has been doing a book club on Michael Crichton's State of Fear. I haven't read the book, but I thought the following comment she made on a passage in it, about the blunders of environmentalists, interesting:
You could have knocked me over with a dodo feather when I got to that passage and realised that you could substitute "environmentalists" with "Traditionalists," make other context-appropriate changes, and have basically the same moral. For despite what some butt-hurt bloggers will tell you, the real problem of the Traditionalist Catholic movement is not a supposed "lack of charity," but a lack of understanding of what it takes to preserve an environment. (Hint: it's not with capes, cigars and Chesterton.)
* The Norwegians have investigated Anders Behring Breivik's claims he is being tortured in prison by not being allowed to upgrade his Playstation and being forced to use non-weaponizable pens and by having to use a desk chair instead of having a nice armchair. Unsurprisingly, they have concluded that he is not being tortured.
* Canada's National Post had an interesting article on a Catholic priest in the Central African Republic protecting fleeing Muslim refugees from being slaughtered by Christian militia:
He and his friends laugh when asked if they ever thought they would live at a church. However, they recognize the gravity of the situation that now faces them.
“If it weren’t for the church and the peacekeepers, we’d all be dead,” says Mahmoud Laminou, who has been here for two weeks.
