Wednesday, August 13, 2025

SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium: Scholars and seekers explore new research

 


SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium

Scholars and seekers explore new research

I recently had the great good fortune to attend the SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium in Florissant, roughly twenty miles northwest of St. Louis, Missouri. This conference was held between July 30 and August 3, 2025 on the 284 acres of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school. The campus includes lush woods, prairie restoration, walking paths to the Missouri River, and a two-story glass-walled dining room offering treetop views. Conference papers were presented by forty-nine speakers from at least seven nations with degrees from a variety of disciplines, including physics, chemistry, law, history, theology, medicine, mathematical modeling, crime lab analysis, and mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering.

The Shroud of Turin is an approximately fourteen-feet by three-feet piece of linen cloth that bears an image of a man crucified as Jesus was, as described in the Gospels. Image features include puncture wounds on the head, where a crown of thorns might have penetrated the scalp, a side wound consistent with the size and shape of a Roman lance, beard-plucking, facial injury, and scourge marks. Some believe that the Shroud of Turin served as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Others insist that the Shroud is a reprehensible hoax. Controversy surrounds the Shroud, often described as the single most studied artifact in history.

Friday, August 8, 2025

Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer, Please Tell the Truth about Friedrich Spee

 

Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer, Please Tell the Truth about Friedrich Spee

Dr. Steven Pinker

Dr. Michael Shermer

Penguin Books

Henry Holt and Company

Gentlemen:


I'm writing to request that you retract what appears to be false material published in both the 2011 Penguin Book Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Dr. Steven Pinker and the 2015 Henry Holt and Company book The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom by Dr. Michael Shermer. I request that you remove this material from any future editions of both books, and that you insert accurate material.


Both books repeat an unsourced anecdote that misrepresents Father Friedrich Spee, one of the first and most influential opponents of the witch craze that seized Europe during the Early Modern Period. This misrepresentation of a long dead priest matters for several reasons.


Friedrich Spee was a human rights hero and pioneer. He risked his life for others.


Spee is a figure of historical importance. Understanding him is key to understanding the witch craze, a significant period in Western history.


Spee's work is highly significant today. His biographers consider Spee to be among the first influential authors to work out an argument against the use of torture to obtain confessions. Spee "ranks among the most important authors of his time." His work "was one of the first sustained, detailed attacks…against the witch trials and use of torture" (Modras 27).


Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer self-identify as representational of atheist reason and truth, as opposed to the alleged obscurantism of persons of faith. That both gentlemen have disseminated unsourced material from a non-scholarly book undermines their self-identification.


Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer self-identify as representing a new and improved, science-and-reason-inspired path toward better lives for all humankind. Father Friedrich Spee should be assessed as an ally, and celebrated, by those interested in human rights. He should not be denigrated and slandered with the use of spurious material and unscholarly methodology.


Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer repeat Charles Mackay's anecdote about Friedrich Spee in their books. As Mackay would have us believe, a humanitarian secular leader, the Duke of Brunswick, "shocked" by the witch craze, which, presumably, is being carried out by Catholic clerics, summons Father Friedrich Spee. The Duke demonstrates to Spee that torture does not work in the extraction of confessions. Brunswick does this by torturing an accused witch into implicating Spee in witchcraft. Spee has an Aha moment and puts an end to the witch craze. Dr. Pinker uses this anecdote to prove that the "Age of Reason" and a "scientific spirit" ended the witch craze. Dr. Pinker places the witch craze in the Middle Ages, as does Dr. Shermer. Dr. Shermer uses the same anecdote to "prove" the same point.


The anecdote is almost certainly false.


I wrote to Dr. Pinker and he was kind enough to reply. He acknowledged that he found the anecdote in a book that cited Charles MacKay's 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Charles MacKay was a Scottish journalist, not a scholar. Delusions is not a serious history of the witch craze. It was written in a popular and sensationalistic style. I found no footnote for the anecdote in my copy of Mackay's book. The reference librarians at the Cheng Library found no footnote for Mackay's anecdote in their copy of Delusions.


Dr. Ronald Modras, author of a biographical sketch of Spee that appeared in a scholarly journal, and author of several other works on Jesuits and Catholic history, wrote to tell me that he has read at least eight works on Friedrich Spee and that none of them mention Mackay's Duke of Brunswick anecdote.


I find no mention of Spee, witches, or torture in one online biography of the Duke of Brunswick (here).


At the height of the witch craze, Friedrich Spee risked his life in writing an anti-witch craze book, Cautio Criminalis. There is no evidence in Cautio Criminalis that it was inspired by any shallow trick of any Duke. Rather, as Modras writes, "The Cautio is not a calmly argued essay on jurisprudence. It is a shrill cry to stop a travesty of justice" (Modras 29).


Cautio Criminalis was inspired by Spee's experience. "I myself have accompanied several women to their deaths in various places over the preceding years whose innocence even now I am so sure of that there could never be any effort and diligence too great that I would not undertake it in order to reveal this truth…One can easily guess what feelings were in my soul when I was present at such miserable deaths."


Cautio Criminalis' argument against the witch craze is not the argument Doctors Pinker and Shermer want it to be. Both Doctors Pinker and Shermer repeat what has since been proven false: that increasing scientific thought ended the witch craze.


In fact Spee does not use a scientific disbelief in witches to support his case against the witch craze. Modras argues that Spee is like a modern-day opponent of the death penalty. Realizing that banning the death penalty outright might be unattainable, death-penalty opponents focus on issues like the high cost of death penalty cases, and the lower cost of life in prison.


Spee's concession to popular belief notwithstanding, his insights about what causes witch crazes are in alignment with contemporary scholarship.


"It all begins with superstition, envy, and calumnies. Something goes amiss, and people clamor for an inquisition. All the divine punishments described in the Bible now come from witches. God and nature are no longer responsible for any mishap; witches do it all" (Modras 32, summarizing Cautio Criminalis).


That a Roman Catholic priest writing in the height of the witch craze offered insights that mirrors the most modern scholarship contradicts the notion that people needed to evolve into, or be tutored by, atheists, or scientists, or twenty-first century moderns.


Spee briefly concedes what his readers probably cannot be disabused of – that witches exist – but then Spee argues that guilt cannot be adequately ascertained, and torture is too cruel and unjust.


Spee uses the tools of his Catholic faith to make his point to his audience. Spee uses traditional Jesuit argumentation style and Biblical citations. He cites the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Just as a farmer allows weeds to grow with wheat, and separates one from the other at harvest, God allows sinners to live out their lives (Matthew 13). Just so accused witches should be allowed to live, Spee argues, in order that people might avoid the serious crime of killing innocents. In risking his life to save others and to cleanse the soul of his church and his wider society, Spee was following the example of his Lord, Jesus Christ.


Spee's traditional, Catholic, Jesuit argumentation style, his graphic descriptions of the cruelty and irrationality of torture, and his Biblical references worked.


Where and when Spee's book was translated and read by leaders, the witch craze ended.


The pattern of Spee's impact was repeated throughout Europe. It wasn't science that ended the witch craze.


I asked prominent witch craze scholar Brian P. Levack, "What ended the witch craze?"


On February 21, 2015, Levack wrote to me, "I address this question at length in the third edition of my book, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, and at great length in my essay on the decline and end of witch-hunting in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: the Eighteenth Century. This is a complicated issue, but my main argument is that the trials did not end because judicial authorities stopped believing in witchcraft but because they began to realize that the crime could not be proved at law."


In his other writings, Spee showed his special concern for women. He wrote a devotional book directed specifically at women's spiritual development. He used feminine metaphors for God. He was a brave and self-sacrificing man who entered primitive hospitals, malodorous, foul places he described in his writing. He died at the young age of 44 of an infection contracted while ministering to the sick.


Nowhere in the factual biography of Father Friedrich Spee does one encounter the silly anecdote deployed by both Doctors Pinker and Shermer to prove that ignorant Catholics required compassionate secular leaders to end the witch craze.


The old-fashioned, popular understanding of the witch craze runs something like this: In the Middle Ages or Dark Ages, the obscurantist, misogynist, all-male and omnipotent Catholic Church murdered millions of innocent, Goddess-worshipping wise women. Then the Enlightenment came along, people rejected religion -- especially Catholicism -- suddenly became very smart and scientific and atheistic, and stopped the witch craze.


Scholars have completely debunked everything about this narrative. The witch craze took place not, as Doctors Pinker and Shermer would have it, during the "Dark" or Middle Ages, but during the Early Modern Period.


In the real Middle Ages, the Catholic Church repeatedly rejected the concept of witchcraft. Societal stresses like the breakup of the Catholic Church during the Reformation, the Little Ice Age, and changes in the prices of basic goods and traditional patterns of almsgiving contributed to witch crazes.


The Inquisition actually sometimes suppressed local witch crazes. See, for example, Alonso de Salazar Frías, the witch's advocate, who was himself a Spanish Inquisitor, and who worked to stop the witch craze in his region. The demand for trials often came from below, from common people, rather than from church or secular leaders, and from women. Envy and petty malice was often the spark. Men as well as women were victimized.


In a metaphorical sense, witch crazes have never ended. During the Reign of Terror, devotees of the Enlightenment, dedicated to atheism and reason, managed to rack up a death toll in one year comparable to the entire number of witch craze victims over the course of three hundred years of trials.


We fool ourselves, and we squander an opportunity to learn how to be better people, when we rewrite the witch craze as something done by people wholly other who lived in a past we have overcome.


We benefit ourselves, and the cause of righteousness, if we recognize that the witch craze was carried out by people exactly like us.


We inspire ourselves to better things when we learn of lives like that of Father Friedrich Spee, what inspired him and what he accomplished.


Doctors Pinker and Shermer, please retract the unsourced and unscholarly anecdote you have disseminated and please change any subsequent editions of your books to reflect the true history, motivations, and impact of Father Friedrich Spee.

***


I sent this letter years ago. It was at my previous blog, the Save Send Delete blog. Google hides that blog so people can't see this letter. 

I have received no word that either Pinker or Shermer cares enough about truth to correct their lies. 

Their falsehoods now appear in the Wikipedia page dedicated to Spee. 

It is tragic that no one cares enough about truth to correct that page. 

https://save-send-delete.blogspot.com/2015/02/steven-pinker-and-michael-shermer.html

Sunday, July 20, 2025

Mamdani, Trotsky, and Stalin

 


Bronshtein in the Bronx and Koba the Dread; Laughter and the Twenty Million

Trotsky, Stalin, and Zohran Mamdani

On June 24, 2025, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, won the primary to be the Democratic Party's nominee for New York City mayor. Mamdani's mother is Indian-born Mira Nair, a filmmaker nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA, and recipient of a Golden Lion. His father Mahmood Mamdani was also born in India. He occupies an endowed chair at Ivy League Columbia University. The Herbert Lehman Professor of Government Chair is named for the son of one of the Jewish Lehman Brothers. The New York Post reports that Columbia professors in Mamdani's class are paid "an average of $308,000 a year." Mahmood Mamdani has been accused of antisemitism. Mira Nair has attempted to get Gal Gadot, a Jewish actress, banned from the Oscars.

Zohran Mamdani is a Twelver Shia, an apocalyptic sect implicated in Iran's push for nuclear weapons. He has professed "love" for jihadi terrorists. He supports the anti-Israel BDS movement. When asked about the phrase "Globalize the intifada," he said that that phrase expresses support for "equality," "human rights," and "equal rights." Bret Stephens corrects Mamdani; "globalize the intifada" means murdering Jews. When Mamdani campaigns in mosques, he is met with cries of "Takbir" and "Allahu akbar." He tells his mosque audiences that Israelis murdered an innocent little Muslim girl named Fatima. Why bring up Fatima Abdullah in the New York City mayoral campaign? Mamdani mentions Fatima to reinforce his portrait of Muslims-as-victims of American Islamophobia and evil Israel. Mamdani self-identifies as Muslims' avenger. "We have a million Muslims in this city. This is is our chance … an opportunity to vote for one of us," he says to mosque audiences. Mamdani does not encourage mosque audiences to vote for the best mayor for New York City. He encourages mosque audiences to vote for tribal power and revenge.

Mamdani also identifies as a socialist. He wants free buses, free childcare, government-controlled rent prices, and government-run grocery stores that sell food at government-set prices, prices that would undercut privately-run stores. He wants to "win socialism," "raise class consciousness," and he also wants to raise property taxes on "whiter neighborhoods." He "firmly believes in" "seizing the means of production." He wants to devote tens of millions of dollars to transgender drugs and surgeries.

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Materialists 2025 Review

 

Materialists 2025

What does a new film tell us about relationships?

Materialists is a 2025 romantic comedy. It was written and directed by Celine Song. Chris Evans (Captain America), Dakota Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey), and Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us) are the film's A-list stars. Materialists was released on June 13, 2025. The film enjoys an 81% positive score from professional reviewers at review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. Amateur reviews are less enthusiastic; they average an only 67% positive score. Materialists has made $35,848,149 against its production budget of $20 million. The film is a "surprise box office success" for its relatively new, small, and edgy distributor, A24 Films.

I loved Materialists. I loved the warm glow of the 35 mm film stock. I loved the gorgeous cast. I loved the few laugh-out-loud funny scenes – I have lived in that same apartment and had those same roommates. I loved the film's attempt to engage big ideas. But the movie isn't for everybody.

Materialists has received a great deal of attention from professional and amateur commentators. Materialists is not just a romantic comedy; it's an essay addressing real-life romance as well as the romantic comedy genre. That being the case, it's a good idea to talk a bit about the romantic comedy genre before talking about the film itself.

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

David Horowitz In Memoriam

 


David Horowitz
In Memoriam

 

In the late 1980s and early 90s, I lived in the People's Republic of Berkeley. Berkeley was one of the forces that made me the person I am today. UC grad school was permission I had been hungering for my entire life, without realizing it. Yes, it is okay to spend an entire day reading, writing, asking questions, and saying things that you weren't sure anyone had ever said. I loved being around intellectually alive people 24/7. I met Annapurna summiteer Arlene Blum (I felt small), Salman Rushdie (super charming), Czeslaw Milosz (rude), Gloria Steinem (kind), Shelby Steele (aloof), Peter O'Toole (indulgent but world-weary smile), and Frank Langella (sooo hot). Berkeley, in those days, was all about healing, and I had alotta wounds to heal. Berkeley's Twelve Step meetings were among the most important religious experiences I've ever had.

 

The San Francisco Mime Troupe's free outdoor plays inspired me. One performance managed to turn Liberty Leading the People, from the Delcroix painting, into a character. I get chills just thinking about it. I felt, "Wow, I have found my tribe. We are going to usher in a better world!" In the cavernous, 1,466-seat UC Theater, I watched all five hours of the Samurai Trilogy in a packed house of whooping and cheering fans. Though I'm from Jersey, where excellent pizza is as the air we breathe, I must salute Zachary's deep dish spinach and mushroom pie. I danced off the calories at Ashkenaz, a warm and welcoming nightclub constructed to resemble an eastern European synagogue.