“But information now is just a bunch of disconnected data or entertainment and, as such, may be worthless, perhaps harmful. As T.S. Eliot wrote a long time ago, information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom.” – Wendell Berry, “Digging In” I have always been a Dodgers fan. […]
I posted this two-part essay on G. K. Chesterton, evolution, and eugenics on this blog quite a while ago — but the original is no longer available online, and a butchered version has been posted on a thing called, I think, the Anti-Fascist Encyclopedia, where it’s received a goodly number of “Likes.” It seems a […]
After about 38 laborious years this book has finally come out. (Okay, that was a slight bit of hyperbole, but I wrote my chapter back in 2008. Many thanks to whichever one of you contributors slowed us down–was that you, Steve?) Nevertheless, it looks to be a promising book that provides a constructive grammatical framework for what has […]
Paul Kahn’s new work Political Theology: Four new chapters on the concept of sovereignty is not an immediate choice for a Brit like me to pay attention to. For its immediate focus and concern is an examination of how the imagination for American political life is funded by ideas of revolution before notions of social contract (constitution). So for all non Americans turning away now, stay with me to the end of the review, for Kahn may prove vital to your non US context.
The universalism debate has been kicked up a bit again, at least in my corner of the ‘interweb’. Responding to Lauren Winner’s essay on Rob Bell in the New York Times Book Review, Jamie Smith questions the “hope” and “imagination” of popular universalists (see also Paul Griffiths response to the same article). Kicking the universalist […]
In an absolute brilliant use of our tax dollars, the federal government spent an entire year orchestrating a bust on an Amish milk company for selling unpasteurized milk (and yes, the customers knew they were buying “raw” milk–that was the whole point). Regardless of the FDA’s take on milk pasteurization, the fact that these incredibly competent federal agents […]
I may have to add a proviso or two to my earlier, Baudrillard-heavy reading of the Royal Wedding. Watching it on PVR the next day (having opted not to get up at 3 am for the talking heads) the whole production turned out to be – as one might perhaps reasonably expect from a wedding […]
Mary Van Denend reflects on Simone Weil’s “Waiting for God,” a seminal piece on Weil’s understandings of grace, affliction, and our “sacred longing” for God.
I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only […]