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Two new books, Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God and Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason, argue that religious extremism imperils the liberal—and, as they see it, fragile—traditions of the West. Both books base much of their analysis on the writings of Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher of public order. But they see the extremist danger coming from dramatically different religious directions. For Lilla, it radiates from unresolved tensions in Christianity, which can burst forth at any moment into millenarian madness. Harris, on the other hand, sees the threat coming from an Islamic fanaticism that the rationalist West is unable to comprehend, much less counter. Matthias Kuntzel shares Harris’s fears. His Jihad and Jew-Hatred is a compelling historical account of how modern Islamic extremism has been informed by the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich.

On the pro-suspension side, a reader at the University of Michigan writes:As a regular reader of your blog (i.e. at break time, I go straight to it to read the latest), I think that you should either put it on hiatus, change the focus, or have a big, permanent, honking disclaimer, as another correspondent said. I don’t think it’s just a matter of hyperlegalism (although that is a problem these days). If I followed the Handyman’s Helper blog and later learned that Handy Hal was a consultant for Home Depot and hadn’t clearly revealed it, I’d be a bit ticked off, even if I hadn’t set foot in Home Depot.If you continue to blog and do any less than announce your consultant status in every column, many liberals will use that to try to discredit you and National Review, as they (wrongly) tried with Maggie Gallagher after Armstrong Williams was (rightly) dropped by Tribune Media Services. Whether you get paid by the Giuliani campaign or not is irrelevant. Serving as an advocate gives you just as much of an interest in a campaign as if you got paid. And even with disclaimers, they will likely accuse NRO of being a web informercial for Republicans. No matter what political issue you write about, there will be a suspicion, however unfair, that your writing is colored by your work for Giuliani.David’s Bookshelf is a good potential blog topic during the campaign. (Full disclosure: I’m a librarian.)

It goes without saying, I hope, that I am utterly opposed to murder. If it were possible to eliminate this, the oldest and most terrible of crimes, from the face of the earth, I should most certainly rejoice at it. So why is it that, when asked to prepare a medico-legal report in a case of murder, whether for the defence or the prosecution, I am extremely pleased and look forward immensely to receiving and reading all the documentation? Why is this, when I know full well that a world without murder would be much better than the one in which we live?

Having devoured the Sherlock Holmes stories as a boy, I did what their author hoped and graduated to his much finer historical novels. The best of these, The White Company, appeared in 1890; it describes the recruitment and deployment of a detachment of Hampshire archers during the reign of King Edward III, a period that, as Arthur Conan Doyle phrased it, “constituted the greatest epoch in English History—an epoch when both the French and the Scottish kings were prisoners in London.”

Adrift. Dysfunctional. Desperately needing a change. The adjectives sound like descriptions of a bad relationship, but about three years ago Xavier University, in Cincinnati, applied them to two of its departments. Both Xavier's library and its information-technology unit were in terrible shape. Xavier had hired four chief information officers in five years, its technology was obsolete, its library and IT staffs didn't talk to each other, and students had to jump through hoops to do online research. David W. Dodd, the CIO who arrived at Xavier in 2005, said students and faculty members wanted three basic things: "Provide the services I'm looking for, in the manner I want, and get out of my way." They weren't getting any of them. The solution was to scrap traditional library and technology units in favor of one with librarians and technology experts working side by side, responding to students' needs for immediate, round-the-clock access to electronic data and interactive Web applications.

Fired up from summer workshops about social bookmarking and other Library 2.0 stuff, I have been experimenting with bookmarking and tagging the resources of the UM-Flint Thompson Library. It's slow-going at the moment, because I'm still ironing out procedures, but I have posted a few pages of bookmarked resources using linkrolls (see this, for example).

In France, the intellectuals still believe that the real victims of crime and criminality are the criminals themselves, at least if a long article that appeared in Le Monde earlier this month is anything to go by. Entitled “Blind Sentences,” it came furnished with a large cartoon of a blindfolded judge, bloodily squashing small people on the bench in front of him with his gavel.

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