When it comes to defining neoliberalism, HSBC’s marketing department continue to make the rest of us look like amateurs Reminder of who benefits when “openness” and “fluidity” are prized as the highest values

In “The Magic Lantern”, Timothy Garton Ash’s eyewitness account of the 1989 revolutions, there’s a passage which, to a reader today, just leaps off the page. It’s about conformism, lies and ideology. Garton Ash, who observed at first hand the changes behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, asks: How much was 1989 an *ideological* revolution? Surely, given that official ideology was scarcely believed even by Party leaders, there was nothing to overthrow?

Commonweal’s September cover story, by David Bentley Hart, argues that Catholics make “wildly inaccurate” claims about Communion and divorce, because they (we) don’t know any history: commonwealmagazine.org/divorce-annulm… But I’m not sure the facts are on his side here. Catholics, he says, rely on “easily discredited fictions about the Christian past…a concept of the early centuries of Christianity that borders on fantasy”. We would know that early Christianity had a “fluid and ad hoc” approach to divorce, if we read Origen, Basil, Epiphanius.