Religion

The arduous process of reforming our country's education system begins today.  After two school reform bills were announced in yesterday's Queen's Speech, Michael Gove is writing to all English primary and secondary schools inviting them to cut loose from local authority control and become academies.  This is but stage one of the reform process: changing the system that's already in place.  The really radical part will come after the summer recess, with the government's plans for pupil premiums and the like.

I doubt His Holiness and I would hit it off, but he is right that Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill would impose strictures upon religious communities that run contrary to their beliefs. The coalescence of British and EU anti-discrimination law is but an immodest garment for trenchant ideology. Harman’s bill strives to subjugate individual freedoms, such as that to religious expression, beneath state-imposed rights. This legislation is the progeny of faith in social engineering, not social mobility; it ignores that toleration and freedom in Britain were derived from the right to religious observance free from state proscriptions.

In 1564 a book was published calculating that there were 7,409,127 demons at work in the world, under the administrative control of 79 demon-princes. Eight years later, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne began to write his Essays, a book which still seems to speak to us directly with all the force of rational understanding and an identifiable human personality. If Montaigne marks the beginning of modernity, it is because he tells us exactly what he is like; how he sees the world, fallibly and yet honestly; and because there was no book in the world like it before, and we are still writing books rather like it today. Montaigne, in common with all great authors, has continued to be infinitely applicable.

Coffee House readers sometimes complain that we do not talk enough about Muslims and Islam. I have certainly shied away from the subject, fearing that emotion and prejudice, rather than argumentation and empirical data, would dominate the debate. I don’t write about Christians, Jews or Buddhists, so why focus on Muslims? At any rate, I don’t like talking about collective groups, much as I prefer not to be talked about based solely on my heritage. But now a new study called Muslims in Europe allows for an empirically-based debate about sentiments across a number of Muslim communities. Based on interviews and surveys in 11 European cities, it presents some interesting facts. It does not tell us what Muslims think, of course, but gives a statistically-relevant sample of views.