Soccer and politics

Recommended: Football Against the Enemy, by Simon Kuper.

Neat exploration of the relationship between a global sport and global politics. I hope someday I get grant money to go do research as fun as this.

Underappreciated

This band shouldn't be overlooked.

Essay - politics and religion

Suggested reading: one of my favorite essays, The Politics of God by Mark Lilla. Sketches the path of the development of western thought, and the relationship between religion and politics in our familiar paradigm. Woven throughout is a neat discussion of the philosophical differences between East and West, and why that especially matters in the modern context, when America has put interactions with the Middle East on the top of the priority list.

Excerpt: A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.