About the death of Pope John Paul II, I have no personal thoughts to share, other than to extend sympathy to the millions around the world who are experiencing his death as a source of considerable sorrow. The wall-to-wall media coverage about the significance of John Paul II or the religious reactions of members of the Catholic faith are mostly over-the-top hagiography, good TV visuals, or simply remote to those of us who don't share that faith. Most of the non-religious commentary on the life of the Pope or the future of the Church has been just another excuse for the commentariat and puditocracy to trot out their favorite over-exercised hobby-horse.

Enlightenment of either the spiritual or intellectual variety has been equally rare in the blogosphere. I've come across two notable exceptions, that weren't simply stale rehashes of ancient debates seen through one predictable worldview or another. Taken together I found they implicitly challenge most of the narratives being imposed on the story of the Pope's death, and thereby challenge a number of assumptions, casually shared by many American and European commentators, about the political valence of religion in the culture of the "West" and in the rest of the world.

The first is a highly personal and entertaining tale by Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber on his family's excursion to see the Pope when he came to Ireland in 1979, and an extraordinary portion of the entire population of the country went to see him. Kieran follows with the unhappy story of what has happened to the Catholic Church in Ireland since the Pope's famous visit.

The Irish story contrasts sharply with Ed Kilgore's thoughtful assessment of John Paul II's significance for the Church in the Southern hemisphere, where the tensions perceived in the Northern hemisphere -- between the "liberal" and "conservative" Pope -- have certainly played out differently.

Yet nearly everything about the powerful and perhaps irreversible trajectory he set for the Church points South, to the Third World, and away from Europe and the United States. Many obituarists of this Pope have struggled to categorize him ideologically as "conservative" on faith and morals yet "liberal" or even "radical" on issues of globalization, poverty and war, even as they acknowledge the unity of his own thinking.

But these are Eurocentric ways of looking at his teachings, which may confuse and distress American Catholics and what's left of the faith in Europe, but make perfect sense to most Catholics in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

A deeply illiberal approach to issues involving sexuality and gender; a rejection of capitalism as a necessary counterpart to democracy; and an abiding hostility to U.S.-European political, military, economic and cultural hegemony: this is a consistent point of view with strong support in the global South, among Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Indeed, in many respects what John Paul II represented was a living link between the pre-modern traditions of European Catholicism and the post-modern realities of much of the rest of the world.
[...]
Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and irreligious, who are outdoing each other this week in viewing this pope's legacy through the lens of their own cultural and political obsessions. This pope's opposition to "American exceptionalism" invariably embraced opposition to the death penalty, to capitalist triumphalism, and to George W. Bush's unilateralist foreign policies, as well as to abortion or birth control or the removal of feeding tubes from the hopelessly dying.

Many conservatives accuse John Paul II's American flock of practicing a "Cafeteria Catholicism" of selective obedience to Rome. But the American Right, I would argue, is practicing "Cafeteria Conservatism"--an equally selective interpretation of this pope's teachings and legacy, which lead not Right or Left but South. [em. added]

To relate these observations to my most recent blog entry -- when those of us from developed liberal democracies embrace the prospect of promoting greater political freedoms and development across continents where genuine freedom is scarce and poverty is endemic, Kilgore's observations should remind us that that large portions of people in those worlds share the "mentality" of a Pope whose attitudes and core beliefs are often hard for us to integrate, reconcile or fully understand. That recognition should be reflected both in the actions we choose and in our expectations about the probable results of our actions.

This item, from a psychology prof at Univ of Toledo, showed up in Altercation's mailbag as part of an ongoing discussion of "how can creationists exclude scientific evidence" ? The full reference for the article is Niebauer, C., Christman, S., Reid, S., & Garvey, K. (2004). "Interhemispheric interaction and beliefs on our origin: Degree of handedness predicts beliefs in creationism versus evolution." Laterality, vol. 9, pp. 433-447 [sub reqd].

[O]ur work shows that strong right-handedness, relative to mixed- or inconsistent-handedness, is associated with an increased tendency to endorse literal creationist myths. In other words, our research indicates that the more strongly right-handed a person is, the more likely they are to endorse literal creationist accounts of the origin of species.

It turns out that a growing body of neurological evidence shows that, while the left hemisphere of our brain maintains our current beliefs about the world, the right hemisphere is responsible for playing "Devil's Advocate": detecting anomalies with those left hemisphere beliefs and forcing an updating of beliefs when appropriate. In order for this belief updating to occur, the right hemisphere has to interact with the left, and strong right-handedness is associated with decreased interaction between the two sides of the brain (hence, the lesser degree of belief updating in strong righties).

While there is certainly more going on in determining people's beliefs about the origin of species than simply one's degree of handedness, I thought your readers might like to learn about a neurological, brain-based factor that is clearly related to whether one believes in evolution versus creationism.

- Stephen Christman, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
University of Toledo

Do we now have a neurological explanation for how some people can maintain, seemingly forever, levels of cognitive dissonance that have other peoples' heads exploding? Thinking in evolutionary psychology terms, and considering some of the advantages Malcolm Gladwell outlines of being able to apply lightening-fast heuristics, one can see certain adaptive benefits to maintaining cognitive bias.

So maybe it's a left-right thing after all?

Actually, I imagine not. Conservatives and traditionalists aren't the only tenacious upholders of fundamental "truths" that fly in the face of reality.

But it does get one ruminating. Both GHW Bush and Clinton -- strong lefties. Hmmm....

I'm feeling like a bear of very little brain this morning. Usually I get right away the points Matt Yglesias makes. This time, however, I think we've got a leap of faith in here somewhere in his two recent posts on university education.

Matt first asked -- not all that rhetorically -- "What is college good for?" if it produces these sorts of results, quoted by Timothy Burke:

"New information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the growth rate of the income gap between those with an undergraduate degree and those with only a high school degree has come to a stop. It had been slowing for a while after dramatic growth in the 1980s and 1990s." {ed., sorry the Burke link's not working}

Not surprisingly, he got a full blast of counter responses along the lines of -- as characterized by Matt -- "shut your trap non-academic ignoramus-man, universities don't exist to serve their students, they exist to serve the cause of advancing human knowledge!"

Apparently something about the surge in the past few days of psychic vibes from the influx of gleeful Republicans to DC has made our Matt feeling a bit out-of-sorts. His response to the responders:

If you don't think your institution should take the education of 18-22 year-olds seriously as a mission, the obvious thing to do is to have your institution join the ranks of the many, many, many not-for-profit organizations that don't educate 18-22 year-olds. Perhaps more fundamental than the question about the mission of any one institution is the question of social design. If colleges don't really exist to teach undergraduates, and if they don't do a very good job of teaching undergraduates, then how much sense does it make for we, as a society, to have turned four-year colleges into the gatekeepers of the American managerial-professional elite. Maybe everyone should just go get a job when they leave high school. If, after a couple years in the workforce which let you get a little seasoning and perspective, you decide you want to be a lawyer, you could then go to law school which might have to be, say, a four year program instead of a three year one. One could imagine similar extended versions of medical school or MBA programs. And your mother wears combat boots, so there. [ed., oops, that last sentence wasn't Matt's]

Setting to one side the unusual but understandable crankiness Matt displays, I think we're in the presence of a non-sequitur. Evidence that status differentials aren't continuing to grow is evidence that a central piece of our society's meritocracy myth is at risk. Something's not working the way we expect -- the implicit promise that a university degree will produce higher status. It isn't, however, necessarily evidence that universities are failing to educate their students.

The factors producing an historical correlation between university attendance and higher status may, or may not, have something to do with whether university graduates are well-educated. Over the past decades, a basic operating assumption of the American political-economic-cultural system has been that the reason why graduates get higher paying, higher status jobs is in part due to the intellectual capital they have accumulated as part of the process of attending college. So we've assumed that the quantity/quality of the education received by an individual is a causal factor of status.

But there are other factors with potential explanatory power, having little to do with what graduates have learned at university or how well they have learned it. Off the top of my head, I'd put on the list of "factors to be investigated" some of the following: changes in the structure of the US and global economy, job content, the evolution of "knowledge workers" as a class of employees, geographic availability of jobs and personal mobility, the shift in distribution of the employed population across age cohorts (etc etc). There might be something going on in each of these areas that is contributing to the flattening of status differentials that have previously been highly correlated with college attendance. Some of these changes might force us to challenge our basic assumption that earlier status differentials correlated with college attendance were "due" to the quantity/quality of education received, that is, whether teachers did a good job of "educating" their students.

If we shift our attention to another country's educational system, it seems like it's the same as saying that the fact that the hordes of university attendees in Egypt can't find jobs - that a university education isn't delivering the return on investment these students hoped for - is because of the poor quality of the teaching faculty. That may be a bit of the puzzle, in the sense that attendance at one of the Egyptian scrums that passes for a university may not be a very good way of acquiring skills valued by the marketplace. But most analysts of the social problems reflected in the poor correlation of improved status with college attendance in Egypt would probably point to some other factors as being more powerful: primarily, the overall structure of Egypt's economy and its ability to absorb college graduates and put to use the skills they acquire at university. We could dramatically improve the quantity/quality of what is taught and what is learned and see virtually no impact on employment prospects for young Egyptian graduates -- and hence very little impact on status differentials.

Returning to the US, let's reframe the issue in the business lingo Matt trots out. Even if we accept that it is legitimate to say that a "product" the university is selling to students is to produce improved ROI for its graduates, it seems to me we are conflating that "product" with another, which the university is also selling: learning. Each "product" has quite different performance outcomes and metrics. One of the best take-aways from my lessons in the conduct of monetary policy applies equally in the context of business strategy: a good rule-of-thumb is to avoid using the same "tool" to try to achieve simultaneously multiple objectives. Otherwise, performance metrics, performance incentives, and strategic choices are going to get mighty muddled.

None of my remarks should be taken as a defense of American universities. Matt raises core problems that need fixing, they just need fixing for reasons other than those Matt poses. And since policy answers we propose usually have a good deal to do with the way we pose the questions we think need solving, this isn't simply a theoretical nicety.

For example, on the question of the quality of teaching. Should universities specialize more than they already do -- some emphasizing teaching while others emphasizing research? There's already a basic product differentiation along those lines as between the liberal arts colleges and the universities with the huge graduate schools. Should that bifurcation be more explicit? Are there faculty incentives -- such as the growing specialization and professionalization of the humanities and social sciences -- that are undermining the priority they have traditionally given to teaching even in the liberal arts settings? What do we mean by "educated" graduates if the instrumental link between a degree and a higher salary is eroding? How does all of this relate to the growing phenomenon of life-time education through both formal and informal institutions, with the informal knowledge-sharing and learning functions internet increasing its "marketshare"?

The question of what is taught and how well it's taught in our colleges and universities is vitally important and should receive a great deal more attention -- it's just a different question than the one Matt has actually posed.

Mark Schmitt has a wonderful post that has an interesting set of comments (including from prak and Billmon). Although not explictly such, the post can be seen part of a related series The Decembrist has been publishing about how Democrats think and communicate policy.

The most recent installment is on the phenomenon of Democratic consultants and politicos of all ilks who are eagerly embracing the advice found in George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives.

You can get an idea of Mark's take on the Lakoff-phenomenon from the title of his Decembrist post: No Guru, No Method, No "DaVinci Code." Yet this post is as much a defense of Lakoff as a take-down. He puts primary blame for the epidemic of silliness on the people doing the embracing, rather on Lakoff himself.

My comment at The Decembrist was sufficiently lengthy and "standalone" that I republish it here [minor edits made only for readability]. I'm rather pleased with the title I've given these remarks, even if I do says so myself.

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My favorite Lakoff -- and where I think the best nuggets of insight are found -- are where he doesn't try to apply his cognitive approach to politics per se.

I'd reach even further back in time than Mark -- to the seminal Metaphors We Live By. It was one of the core applications of related ideas in Berger & Luckmann's equally seminal The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.

Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's "metaphors" were an epiphany. By now, the perspective they presented has been thoroughly incorporated into how Americans see things in their information marketplace, even if some of us aren't totally "fluent" yet in metaphors, narratives and frames. Certainly this stuff is mothers milk today for the successful marketing and advertising hacks Billmon's talking about, whether they work in the political sphere or are just flogging commercial products.

The research program of Lakoff and his co-authors over the past few decades, or of cognitionists (somebody help me out, what's the right term?) who are heavily influenced by his core ideas, is similarly rich with ways of understanding how the process of talking about what we think has such a reciprocal effect with the way we think, and even what we think/believe. Those concepts have endless application to politics.

The giant Lakoff-hug happening now just illustrates that we always need somebody to be the popularizer of these sorts of ideas. Most political hacks -- Democrats or Republicans -- aren't going to trawl through the rather dense pages of current debates on such relevant issues as epistemology, heuristics and decision-making in quick-time, and how all of that is being affected by the acceleration of the unintermediated horizontal flow of information and ideas represented by the internet.

We need the Malcolm Gladwells and James Surowieckis to do that for us, as in their week-long BookClub discussion in Slate earlier this month. But even that step isn't enough. We then we need another round of popularizing -- to take the concepts and insights that have been boiled down and reframed by the Gladwells et al and then show how they apply in a particular setting. In the case at hand, the realm of domestic politcs.

This process isn't somehow unique for the fighters and their managers in the arena of political combat. It's the same for the business managers and marketing professionals who apply new insights emerging from cognitive neuroscience and its various "liberal arts" counterparts -- whether linguistics, rhetoric, neuroeconomics, etc. The business-types have one big advantage over the political-types, however. The B-schools produce first-rate popularizers of these concepts. The B-school professors do the trawling for nuggets for the managers, and do the digesting, synthesizing and finding real-world case studies to apply these ideas.

Business types and politicos have this behavior in common: thinking they've found the guru and the silver bullet when all they've found is the "flavor of the month." A favorite object of B-school studies is the company that got screwed up by management's over-eager embrace of "lessons" taken out of context from the latest business-best-seller. So the fact that practitioners of Democratic strategy and communication think they have found the recipe for gold shouldn't come as a surprise.

I certainly agree with Mark that we need people who digest insights "...like Lakoff's, and some insight from a historian like Alan Brinkley or Kevin Mattson, and some insight from an economist like, say, Edward Wolff, and a sociologist here and a journalist or three, and put them in perspective and integrate them." I also think he makes a very important point that it takes an old-fashioned cross-disciplinary "liberal arts" mentality to do that. We all pay a price for the narrowing academic professionalization/specialization of the humanities and social sciences.

I'd add that it's not just a matter of finding people with the right breadth of mind to do the digesting and thinking for the vast majority of us who aren't going to do it ourselves. I'd suggest an equally important part of the overall problem is the absence of a group of competent popularizers who can do the same thing for politics as the B-school professors do for business and marketing.

As Mark points out, it's really rather unfair to Lakoff to expect him to be intellectual innovator, applied research scientist, and popularizer all in one. Unfortunately, I think Lakoff's not applied some lessons from his own important work to himself. But he's not the first intellectual to be blinded a bit by the bright lights of the public stage.

Maybe while we're talking about expanding Democratic-oriented policy centers and think tanks we should add a "Policy Center for Epsitemology and Rhetoric" to do the popularizing?

[UPDATE 12-10-04 from 12-4-04] Jonathan Chait finds himself puzzled over why those on the Right are embracing with glee a new study showing academics have a decidedly Democratic tilt.

After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?
[...]
Second, professors don't particularly want to be Republicans. In recent years, and especially under George W. Bush, Republicans have cultivated anti-intellectualism. Remember how Bush in 2000 ridiculed Al Gore for using all them big numbers?

That's not just a campaign ploy. It's how Republicans govern these days. Last summer, my colleague Frank Foer wrote a cover story in the New Republic detailing the way the Bush administration had disdained the advice of experts. And not liberal experts, either. These were Republican-appointed wonks whose know-how on topics such as global warming, the national debt and occupying Iraq were systematically ignored. Bush prefers to follow his gut.

In the world of academia, that's about the nastiest thing you can say about somebody. Bush's supporters consider it a compliment. [...]

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Ellen Goodman nails the constant whingeing on the Right about the Left's dominance of academia:

What next? Quotas for Republican anthropologists?

It's just about as constructive (and attractive) as the Left's own never-ending application of diversity metrics in every social setting.

IMHO, what we should be more concerned about is the increasingly narrow and detached focus of academic specialties that professionalization has promoted. These tendencies encourage the self-selection process and reinforce political bias in the very definition of the scope of appropriate academic inquiry. Although George Will's recent op-ed on the Left's domination of academia falls into several of the traps Goodman identifies, he does underline this legitimate area of concern. He quotes a recent article by Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. [From "Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual," Nov 12 2004, sub req'd]

Bauerlein says that various academic fields now have regnant premises that embed political orientations in their very definitions of scholarship:

"Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies."

This gives rise to what Bauerlein calls the "false consensus effect," which occurs when, because of institutional provincialism, "people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population."

That would require new institutional vehicles and shifts in professional incentives that rewarded truly inter-disciplinary approaches to defining what questions need asking. Too often, fashionable multi-disciplinary centers are spaces for integrative conversations in name only, merely attracting the funding that allows scholars to till their personal little gardens.

MC MasterChef's post on modernity and terrorism spun off an entire tangent about comparative religion as an area of knowledge, and how part of solving some of our conflicts will involve being open to learning about the "other" or the "alien". The discussion has been asking why this is especially a challenge in the field of religion, and some of the areas where greater learning should be promoted.

The topic is getting increasingly long and complex, so I thought moving it to the front page might help. The main part of the conversation starts here between Oscar and me.

This post responds to ideas Bondra presented about the frequent tension between personal faith and knowledge about other religions.

It is also a very belated attempt to respond to some of the observations JC made last week, responding to MC MasterChef's Christianism post, about the tensions between the personal and political in religious experience and matters of faith.

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When we deal with faith or religiosity at the individual level, rather than at the level of a religion's theology, institutions, history, etc. there are clearly a bunch of factors that come into play. Here are a few observations tossed out. Not as well organized as I'd like, but you'll get the drift.

One of the big problems we've had with this whole post-election brouhaha is that nobody pays attention to level-of-analysis. Here we're dealing with indvidual voting decisions and trying to claim causality from an institutional affiliation, where we keep focusing on personal attitudes on one topic (religion) being extended to other topics (abortion, gay marriage, etc) and we're paying less attention to the institutional affiliation aspects.

By that I mean that we don't know what the actual beliefs are of a voter who "belongs" to a specific denomination, who "regularly practices" the religion (which we measure by the proxy of church attendance), how strongly those beliefs are held, the degree to which the beliefs are internal (related to the experience of faith) or external (related to membership or loyalty to group), and so on and so on.   more »

One of America's increasingly prominent scholars in the fields of international relations and national security is none other than MC MasterChef's own professor at BU, Andrew Bacevich (specialty American military affairs). His op-ed today in the LATimes, "Unsafe for Democracy," is a timely reminder of a dimension of the recent election that has not received enough attention. With most post-mortems focusing on why Kerry came up short -- why Bush voters didn't pull the lever for Kerry, rather than an assessment of why Kerry voters rejected Bush -- no serious appraisal of the foreign policy voting patterns has received any prominence so far.

The President and his supporters have claimed bluntly that because he won, the Democrats should be expected to "stop campaigning" and support his foreign policies to promote "healing" and "national unity." All well and good from a "rally 'round the troops" standpoint, especially as serious fighting has just been launched in Fallujah. But in terms of how America should position itself in the world going forward, a substantial portion of Democrats and independents who voted for Kerry believe continuing down the road that the Bush Doctrine has placed us on would be a profoundly dangerous mistake.

Although a large portion of the electorate has begun to feel that the US got off was unwise to invade Iraq, a fundamental debate about the role of the US in a unipolar world has not yet been joined. During the election campaign, most of the pointed critique of Bush Admin policies and actions -- from either Democrats or the press -- involved relatively narrow issues, such as the feebleness of the grounds for the invasion of Iraq or the lack of competence in planning and execution of the post-invasion phase. Even those claims didn't receive a great deal of public attention until late in the campaign because of the slow process by which concrete evidence emerged that countered the Admin's fantastically rosy pictures of reality. (See discussions in "Media Tipping-Point " and "What will those dumb Americans do next?"

Bacevich argues, along the same lines as John Ikenberry's "Liberal Leviathan" analysis, that the witches brew of traditional conservative US foreign policy principles with Wilsonian idealism is neither sustainable at home nor acceptable abroad. Bacevich does not outline his preferred approach -- whether to shift from conservative to liberal traditional principles and/or to jettison Wilsonianism in favor of some version of realism or a new idealism . But that political elites must recast the discussion in terms other than the "false coinage" of "freedom" and "democracy" cannot be disputed.    more »

[UPDATE] This essay is one of three on the recommended reading list of the "Grand Strategic Choices Working Group" of the Princeton Project on National Security (Woodrow Wilson School). The group is one of seven organized for the academic year 2004-05. John Ikenberry is co-chair of this working group along with Francis Fukuyama. The other two recommended essays are Fukuyama's article from the Summer 2004 issue of National Interest, "The Neoconservative Moment," (sub reqd) and "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World" by Charles Krauthammer (Speech to American Enterprise Institute, February 12, 2004) .

See praktike's Democratic Realism is a Joke, which discusses this debate.

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John Ikenberry's piece from Britain's Prospect magazine, written prior to the election, sets out the case for liberal hegemony. It is a vision in sharp distinction to the conservative hegemony that the Bush Administration has been pursuing, especially since 9/11, and which Ikenberry explains will lead to tears. The shape of his overall argument, reflected in the excerpts selected below, is of more interest than his descriptions of the familiar set of actions and attitudes of the Bush Admin that he uses to illustrate and reinforce his analysis. We

Let's start with his conclusion, also the title of the piece.

A traditional realist strategy of reconstructing a Westphalian balance of power order that reaffirms state sovereignty is quite unrealistic, particularly given unipolarity and the character of the new security threats. There is no going back.

What the world needs is an order where the US continues to underwrite global security but does so within a framework of rules and bargains that render the resulting system legitimate and sustainable. We need to move beyond balance of power and empire towards an international order that combines American unipolar power with widely agreed upon rules and institutions. The world needs a liberal leviathan.

His conclusion is not surprising -- it reflects the basic premises of those who set the grand strategy for the US, and therefore defined the key structures of the liberal international system in the West, during and after WWII. With the interim Cold War brought to an end, there is a return to the logic of the system that was installed by the Western allies and elaborated through building regional and international institutions and arrangements.

As such, his analysis is part of the overall "empire" debates that have sprung up, especially post 9-11. Falling in the camp of "in a unipolar system the world needs a hegemon" he takes the argument further beyond debates that view the world through the US perspective -- type of empire, whether empire is the right term, whether managing an empire is consistent with other key features of the American character or system -- and instead discusses the US role within the context of a new and challenging international system.

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Or so say Alans Blinder and Krueger in a new paper:

Public opinion influences politicians, and therefore influences public policy decisions. What are the roles of self-interest, knowledge, and ideology in public opinion formation? And how do people learn about economic issues? Using a new, specially-designed survey, we find that most respondents express a strong desire to be well informed on economic policy issues, and that television is their dominant source of information. On a variety of major policy issues (e.g., taxes, social security, health insurance), ideology is the most important determinant of public opinion, while measures of self-interest are the least important. Knowledge about the economy ranks somewhere in between.

I haven't rea the paper yet, but what this suggests to me is that economic views are highly malleable. If nothing else, the last thirty years of right-wing thinktankery have shown that in practice.

This is a fascinating conceptualization of things, one that we've edged around at a few points in the course of my Political Islam in South Asia class but haven't yet tackled full-on. (One recommendation, made with qualifications, on the subject that Prof. Haqqani did make last week was a book by Tariq Ali called The Clash of Fundamentalisms which I gather elaborates more on the identities and goals of the major world fundamentalist ideologies.) Comparisons between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism often raise ire early on that prevents much further discussion, but I would really like to see this expanded upon. Unfortunately, I have a paper to be writing at the moment, so my thoughts will have to wait.