The sight is disconcerting at best — beautiful buildings that once housed Christian worship now transformed into bars, restaurants, entertainment clubs . . . and mosques. The cityscapes of Europe are increasingly dotted with church buildings transformed into secular or explicitly non-Christian uses. The abandonment of these buildings is a sign of a much more fundamental abandonment — the abandonment of Christianity itself.

What do we do with those who deny the Holocaust? This is not a new question, but the two-day conference that drew Holocaust deniers to Iran has put the question back on the front pages.

Events of recent days underscore the moral dimension of history. The death at age 91 of General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, came as he was under indictment for human rights abuses and tax evasion.

The current question at “On Faith,” sponsored by The Washington Post and Newsweek magazine, is this:

A horrible discovery was made last week near the German town of Menden. The lack of media attention about this in the United States should serve as an alarm in itself.

Edmund Wilson once described Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln as “the worst thing to happen to Lincoln since his assassination.” That acerbic comment came to mind as I read this article published in The Times [London]. This time, it is the Puritans who are abused once again.

The current issue of Christianity Today offers an interesting cover story entitled, “The Case for Kids.” Written by Leslie Leyland Fields, the article also features a fascinating subtitle — “A defense of the large family by a ‘six time breeder.’”

News reports on Sunday indicated that the last survivor of the sinking of the Titanic died Saturday at age 99. Lillian Gertrud Asplund was only five when the “unsinkable” ship went down in the cold dark waters of the North Atlantic. She survived the disaster along with her mother and younger brother, then age 3. Both died long after the sinking.

Jean-Francois Revel, one of Europe’s greatest defenders of human liberty, died Saturday in Paris, at age 82. As a younger man, Revel had been attracted to Marxism and socialism. Like a generation of his fellow French philosophers, Revel thought America to be decadent and repressive. Yet, when he actually visited the United States, he found a very different reality. He was never uncritical of the United States, but he saw America as the shape of the future, even as he saw Europe losing faith in democratic values.

Revel was one of the first to see the deep evil of the Soviet Union, and he called on the great democracies to defend liberty in an increasingly dangerous world. His death marks the passing of a generation of leading European intellectuals who had been shaped by the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. To mark his death, here is an article I wrote in Revel’s honor in 2003.