Genealogy’s End

Last updated on: June 22, 2020 at 10:54 am By John Ehrett

After Nietzsche, where does (secular) philosophy go? Or, put a different way, given the ubiquity of “criticism” as an approach to philosophical inquiry—that is, the process of ascertaining and challenging the presuppositions underlying truth-claims, as opposed to setting forth a cohesive affirmative project—it’s not unreasonable to ask where the deconstructive process ends. With everything seemingly up for grabs, is there any intellectual destination in mind? Continental philosopher Patricia MacCormack certainly thinks so—and in her recent book The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism... Read more

The Old Gods or the New? A Review of Tara Isabella Burton’s “Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World”

Last updated on: June 18, 2020 at 7:18 pm By John Ehrett

In his magisterial 2007 tome A Secular Age, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor might’ve spoken too soon. Taylor told a multi-causal story of a world increasingly drained of religious sentiment, closely connected to the emergence of a “buffered self” impervious to the metaphysical forces of the earlier “enchanted” world. But thirteen years on, the world looks rather different than Taylor perhaps predicted. An ascendant populism, frequently associated with expressions of overt faith and embrace of premodern tradition, has spread across the... Read more

After Postliberal Despair

Last updated on: June 16, 2020 at 8:28 am By John Ehrett

Towards the end of his recent book America On Trial: A Defense of the Founding, Robert Reilly sketches out an argument about the pedagogical importance of defending the philosophical principles underlying the American project. In particular, Reilly observes that the tendency among a number of prominent conservative intellectuals to declare that the American experiment was a failure from the start—that all the pathologies of 2020 should reasonably have been foreseen in 1789—cannot help but have a profoundly demoralizing effect on the... Read more

Trying to Read Great Books

Last updated on: June 7, 2020 at 5:16 pm By John Ehrett

I ran across an excellent recent post by my former professor and fellow Patheos blogger, Gene Veith, about the importance of inhabiting, rather than simply teaching, the great triumphs of Western civilization. Veith invites readers to try some of the great accomplishments of the Western tradition, particularly if they’ve never really engaged them before. And that, in turn, led me to reflect on what it takes to truly develop a love of the best that the liberal arts have to... Read more

The Wrongheaded Smear Campaign Against Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Last updated on: May 27, 2020 at 8:59 am By John Ehrett

Apart from the slow-smoldering controversy over “Radical Lutheranism”—a subject for another day—Lutherans don’t get up to very much online drama. Instead, I’ve been watching with increasing concern as some serious discontent (which I previously wrote about here) has fomented in the Southern Baptist corner of the web. Since that last post, the heat has been considerably turned up. Albert Mohler—the dean of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky—is a candidate for the denomination’s presidency this year, and critics on... Read more

The Hunger Games Prequel Is Worth Your Time

Last updated on: May 25, 2020 at 4:32 pm By John Ehrett

Like Nietzsche’s madman, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy may have come too soon. In the decade or so since its heyday, it’s become easy to write off the series as a momentary teen-lit sensation that prompted a flurry of terrible imitators. (Remember Divergent? That’s okay, neither does anyone else.) But the Hunger Games series looks rather different in 2020 than it did upon release. Most notably, the books’ central motif—the struggle of a ravaged Appalachia to withstand a decadent Capitol... Read more

Umberto Boccioni and the Joyful Future

Last updated on: May 20, 2020 at 9:16 pm By John Ehrett

Among proponents of an emerging “Christian postliberal” vision of life, one of the most common themes is the need to reclaim a sacramental understanding of reality—an understanding of the cosmos as more than simply a reserve of natural resources given for technological exploitation and domination, as itself a theophanic manifestation of God’s beauty. I certainly share that commitment. But I can’t help noticing that, all too often, Christian postliberals struggle to articulate a compelling philosophy of technology. Specifically, high-profile proponents... Read more

“Liberalism” Is No Longer a Useful Term

Last updated on: May 17, 2020 at 11:59 am By John Ehrett

Over the last few days, I’ve been reading Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar’s interesting little book Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation. What makes the book particularly compelling is the fact that it was written in 2014—years before the “populist turn” that launched the UK out of the European Union and put Donald Trump in the White House. Biggar’s volume is, at bottom, a Christian defense of the principles of liberal democracy—but those principles are not exactly conceived... Read more

One Assembly, One Worship Service?

Last updated on: May 11, 2020 at 10:56 am By John Ehrett

One of my criteria for discerning a truly good book is whether it forces me to think deeply about a topic I’ve long taken for granted—and in particular, whether it outlines a challenging argument that forces me to revise some of my unquestioned assumptions. Jonathan Leeman’s new book One Assembly: Rethinking the Multisite ad Multiservice Church Models is such a book. This isn’t the sort of volume that’d usually show up on my radar—perhaps to my detriment, I don’t really keep... Read more

The Rothko Tragedy

Last updated on: May 6, 2020 at 7:20 pm By John Ehrett

A few months ago, haunted by Mark Rothko’s ethereal canvases after a visit to Washington, D.C.’s Phillips Collection, I wrote the first draft of the piece that eventually became “Rothko and the Beauty of Becoming.” Since then, a good deal has changed: I’ve done a lot more reading on the philosophy and trajectory of modern art (and on Rothko’s career). I’ve spent some time reflecting on the legendary painter’s own approach to art. And, of course, the world has found... Read more