Slate: The Parkland Teens Will Win. Eventually.

In response to the Parkland shooting, advocates are trying a few tactics that are relatively new to the gun-control debate, if not to progressive activism writ large. Students in Connecticut are trying to plan a National School Walkout on April 20, the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine massacre. Teachers have discussed doing their own. High school survivors from Parkland have announced a March for Our Lives to take place in Washington on March 24, with concurrent satellite marches in other locales around the country, along the lines of the Women’s March held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. It has the potential to be the largest national demonstration for gun control the U.S. has ever seen.

Those who’ve watched children slaughtered in their classrooms many times over with no discernible change in gun-control policy or decline in American gun ownership may have reason to doubt that any of these activist measures will accomplish what the others have not. None of the organizations founded after other massacres have shifted the U.S. gun-control conversation in meaningful ways, jolted the general public into a new sense of urgency, or changed the hearts and minds—and, more importantly, the votes—of legislators. Recent polling shows that 97 percent of Americans support universal background checks for gun purchasers, including 97 percent of gun owners, and more than two-thirds support a nationwide ban on assault rifles. Clearly, public opinion is not enough to sway public officials bankrolled by the National Rifle Association, which opposes any expansion of federal gun regulations, including stronger background checks. [...]

In other words, the best outcomes gun-control activists can hope for in the foreseeable future are incremental. Florida legislators have agreed to consider instating a three-day waiting period for all rifle purchases and raising the legal age for assault-rifle possession to 21. Such a law might have prevented Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who allegedly murdered his Parkland classmates with an AR-15, from buying his gun, but only temporarily. The same legislative body refused to even discuss a possible ban on assault weapons, while teen survivors of Parkland looked on, even as they approved a resolution calling pornography a public health risk. These are not people prepared to be moved by a rousing address, postcards from progressives, or a march on the National Mall.

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Social Europe: How To Tackle Populism: Macron Vs Kurz

The re-branding of his Austrian People’s Party forestalled a tougher stance on immigration, while he borrowed the far-right’s polemical rhetoric on EU ‘Zentralisierung’, or ‘centralisation’. By the end of the campaign, the dividing lines between the centre-right and far-right were sufficiently blurred for one to ask: which is the populist? The subsequent announcement of a coalition government involving the far right is a cause for great concern.

Emmanuel Macron used different tools. His counter-vision approach involved debunking the tenuous promises made by his populist adversary Marine Le Pen, while offering attractive alternative arguments. This is the harder of the two to pull off. It requires an individual of political skill and personal charisma with the courage to confront the populist head-on, without fear of disturbing the ideological balance of one’s party. In his presidential election campaign, Macron offered a text-book example of how to deploy the counter-vision. He directly attacked Le Pen and her anti-euro arguments – and skilfully exposed their paucity. In so doing, he provided a convincing defence of France’s role in the European Union, while appealing to French patriotism. [...]

On the other hand, the Kurz strategy is a dangerous one. When a figure – and party – of the so-called establishment adopts the policies and rhetorical devices of an extreme opponent, and where electoral considerations trump sound policy making, the outlook promises to be grim. The Kurz approach, if followed by others, will equate to a gentle ‘hollowing out’ of the European Project from within. Europe might be spared the Austrian Freedom Party, or indeed the Front National in power. But, if the Austrian and French centre-right adopt their policies anyway, what difference does it make? [...]

A new vision and set of EU objectives must reflect features of international cooperation that today inspire and are of most value to Europeans. It must centre on extending the benefits of greater connectivity – digital, technological, mobility-related – to more Europeans. It must build on the theme of greater opportunity – where the EU makes more people more prosperous, keeping the best, while protecting citizens from the worst aspects of globalisation. It must also highlight the principle of solidarity – an EU demonstrating a social and humanitarian dimension, across member states and civil societies.  

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The New York Review of Books: Luther vs. Erasmus: When Populism First Eclipsed the Liberal Elite

The publication of Erasmus’s revised New Testament was a milestone in biblical studies. It gave scholars the tools to read the Bible as a document that, while divinely inspired, was a human product that could be deconstructed and edited in the same manner as a text by Livy or Seneca. As copies began circulating, the magnitude of Erasmus’s achievement was immediately recognized. Not since Cicero had an intellectual figure so dominated Western discourse as Erasmus did in that enchanted spring of 1516. “Everywhere in all Christendom your fame is spreading,” wrote John Watson, a rector in England with whom he was friendly. “By the unanimous verdict of all scholars, you are voted the best scholar of them all, and the most learned in both Greek and Latin.” [...]

Knowledge of geography, history, astronomy, and nature was all to be imparted through readings in the classical authors specified by Erasmus. His educational program was, in short, highly elitist, seeking not to prepare ordinary citizens for a productive life but to train an aristocracy of culture and taste that could guide the rest of society. This curriculum became the basis for upper-class schooling in Europe until well into the nineteenth century; through it, knowledge of the classical canon would become a ruthlessly clear indicator of class. [...]

Beyond that immediate matter of dispute, however, their conflict represented the clash of two contrasting world views—those of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Erasmus was an internationalist who sought to establish a borderless Christian union; Luther was a nationalist who appealed to the patriotism of the German people. Where Erasmus wrote exclusively in Latin, Luther often used the vernacular, the better to reach the common man. Erasmus wanted to educate a learned caste; Luther, to evangelize the masses. For years, they waged a battle of ideas, with each seeking to win over Europe to his side, but Erasmus’s reformist and universalist creed could not match Luther’s more emotional and nationalistic one; even some of Erasmus’s closest disciples eventually defected to Luther’s camp. Erasmus became an increasingly marginal figure, scorned by both Catholics, for being too critical of the Church, and Lutherans, for being too timid. In a turbulent and polarized age, he was the archetypal reasonable liberal.

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Vox: The Church of England’s Lent challenge: give up plastic

To critics, the church’s actions may seem emblematic of a wider “secularization” of Lent: in which an originally spiritually focused religious observance becomes more about anodyne notions of “wellness” and “doing good.” It’s fair, too, to critique the movement as a bid for relevancy by a fading institution: A 2016 poll found that the number of Britons attending a weekly Church of England service fell for the first time to fewer than 1 million (or less than 2 percent of the UK’s population).

Those criticisms would be valid. But at the same time, the Church of England’s actions reflect a wider willingness among many mainline Protestant and Catholic Christian groups to focus on combating structural or global issues — from income inequality to environmental stewardship — alongside individual misdeeds.  [...]

Francis’s notion of sin as something collective and structural, not just individual, has informed much of his theology, from his environmentalism to his fervently anti-capitalist stance, a dynamic also at play in the way the Church of England is talking about its own initiatives.

It’s worth noting that these initiatives, which tend to be popular with Catholics and mainline Protestants, are not necessarily shared by all Christians. American evangelicals, in particular, have long been wary of environmental causes, seeing them as a threat to what they envision as man’s God-given dominion over the earth.

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Quartz: Dear America, here’s how other countries stop mass shootings

Research shows that countries with fewer guns have lower homicide rates. Even US states with fewer guns have fewer homicides; in a landmark 2002 study, analysis of data from 1988 to 1997 showed that states with “high” gun ownership had three times the rate of homicide than states with few guns. A decade later, a 2013 study found that every percentage point increase in gun ownership corresponded to a 0.9% higher risk of gun homicide. Countries and states that legally limit overall gun ownership simply have fewer gun deaths. [...]

The United States stands out among countries for the frequency with which its mass shootings occur. But last year, after the US witnessed its most fatal mass shooting in history at Las vegas, the Trump administration made it easier—not harder—for people with mental illness to buy guns. (That decision rolled back Obama-era restrictions that had been passed in the wake of Sandy Hook.) [...]

Back in 1996, it took only 12 days after a mass shooting for Australia to pass the National Firearms Agreement, which banned automatic and semi-automatic weapon for “personal defense.” The country created a temporary buyback program for guns that had become illegal. Stricter background checks were enforced. As Zeif pointed out yesterday, there have been no school shootings in Australia since.

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