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Not minimum, living

Father Jake has a good post on the failure of a Senate bill to increase the minimum wage. I love the FDR quote about the minimum wage and its implicit moral component. Riverstone picks up the idea and places it in the context of the teachings of Hazrat Isa. The two of them bring up an interesting point: If the people voting down this legislation are not interested in representing the will of the American people, nor in practicing the teachings of Hazrat Isa, are they the representatives of America? Christianity? If so, is this really what they stand for?…

L’affaire Burqa – in the West

I have always been uncomfortable around Muslim women wearing the full veil or Burqa.  Growing up in Karachi,  I only knew one woman who wore a full veil – "Apaa" my Urdu and Quran teacher.  I just never encountered in my 12 years there many women who wore a veil.  Thus, now, it is so surprising for me to see Muslim women veiled in Western countries. On the one hand – the feminist in me wants to shake them up and say: "Why? Oh Why? are you doing this?" – but then the other feminist says: "Its a free world…

The Beginning of the End

The October 2006 issue of Vanity Fair contains two important articles, which are worth reading: Empire Falls, by Niall Ferguson, and Under Egypt’s Volcano, by Scott Anderson. In Empire Falls, Fergusson uses historian Edward Gibbon’s theories on the decline and fall of Rome to make an interesting, if not convincing, case for the same state of conditions currently in play in the West. Gibbon’s blamed Rome’s decline on external military overreach, internal corruption, social decadence, religious transformation, and barbarian invasion. Fergusson counters with the War on Terror, the cult of personality, superficiality, reality TV, cultural decline, immigration, and the rise…