Peru = Top 10 Places for Culture?

The picture on the right is of Our Lady of Fatima. It's the church that I try to visit daily. Luckily, it's just a 2-3 minute walk from my place.


http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/15/culture-travel-destinations-forbeslife-cx_ls_0115travel_slide_8.html?thisSpeed=15000





Peru
Known both for its textiles and folk art as well as ancient structures and biodiversity, the OECD says Peru classifies 93% of its tourists as cultural tourists. However, Peru is different from many other cultural meccas in that it targets young travelers who spend less per day, but tend to stay longer. Along with volunteer tourism, those with an International Student Identity Card receive discounts on everything from hostels to Inca Trail tours.

It was exciting to see that I'm in one of the top countries in the world for culture! Hopefully some of it will rup off on me!

The continuation of the Culture War from Peter Kreeft:

...There is, however, an irrefutable refutation of the “pig philosophy”; the simple, statistical fact that suicide—the most in-your-face index of unhappiness—is directly, not indirectly, proportionate to wealth. The richer you are and the richer your country is, the more likely it is that you will find life so good that you will choose to blow your brains out. (Perhaps that is the culmination of open-mindedness.)

Suicide among pre-adults has increased 5000 percent since the happy days of the 50s. If suicide, especially of the coming generation, is not an index of crisis, I don’t know what is.
Just about everybody except the “deep” thinkers know[s] that we are in deep doo-doo. The students know it but not the teachers—the mind-molders, especially in the media. Everybody in the hospital except the doctors knows that we are dying. Night is falling. Mother Teresa said simply, “When a mother can kill her baby, what is left of civilization to save?” What Chuck Colson has labeled a “new dark age” is looming; a darkness that christened itself The Enlightenment at its birth three centuries ago. And this brave new world has proved to be only a cowardly old dream.

We are able to see this now, at the century of genocides closed—the century that was christened “The Christian Century” at its birth by the founders of a magazine devoutly devoted to false prophecy.

We’ve also had some true prophets who have warned us. Kirkegaard, 150 years ago, in The Present Age. And Spengler almost 100 years ago in The Decline of the West. And G. K. Chesterton, who wrote 75 years ago that, “The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality, and especially on sexual morality. And the madness of tomorrow will come not from Moscow but from Manhattan.” And Aldous Huxley, 65 years ago, in Brave New World. And C. S. Lewis, 55 years ago, in The Abolition of Man. And David Reisman, 45 years ago, in The Lonely Crowd. And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 20 years ago, in his Harvard commencement address. And John Paul the Great, the greatest man of the worst century in history, who had even more chutzpah that Ronald Reagan (who dared to call them the “evil empire”) by calling us the “culture of death.” That’s our culture—and his, including Italy, which now has the lowest birth rate in the entire world; and Poland, which now wants to share in the rest of the West’s great abortion holocaust.

If the God of Life does not respond to this culture of death with judgment, then God is not God. If God does not honor the blood of the hundreds of millions of innocent victims of this culture of death, then the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, the God of Israel, the God of the prophets, the God of orphans and widows, the Defender of the defenseless, is a man-made myth, a fairy tale, a comfortable ideal as substantial as a dream.

“But,” you may object, “Is not the God of the Bible also forgiving?” He is. But the unrepentant refuse forgiveness. Forgiveness, being a gift of grace, must be freely given and freely received. How can it be received by a moral relativist who denies that there is anything to forgive? (Except unforgiving-ness. Nothing to judge but judgmentalism. Nothing lacking but self-esteem.) How can a Pharisee or a pop psychologist be saved...?