A few updates

Here are some articles relevant to a couple of recent posts:

* An anthropologist supports my point that, even if a tribal culture has some practice of adult/child sexual contact as a part of initiation, how can a white man who grew up in Sydney claim this as mitigation for his having sex with a boy in his care? (In any event, the anthropologist suggests that that there is no evidence of such practices in Torres Strait.)

* On the issue of whether or not Muslim incursions into Europe were that bad a thing (David Levering Lewis has argued they more or less did Europe a favour,) here's a piece summarising the worst aspects of Muslim expansionism.

* Theodore Dalrymple has a go at Archbishop Rowan William's opaque use of language in his recent talk about Sharia law. Very true. I wonder what his theological writing is like: one suspects he seeks to overcome controversy in the ranks of believers simply by force of mystifying language.