Cosmos: Weakened Edition, 8

Last updated on: November 22, 2015 at 10:26 am By Artur Rosman

A summary of what’s not weak this week on Cosmos the in Lost: 1. EXCLUSIVE: Longtime Immigration Lawyer & Pastor Explains the Refugee Process 2. Why Have Civilians Become Primary Jihadist Targets? 3. The Jonah Paradox: Is Humanity Living on Borrowed Time? 4. TOP10 SciFi Book & Film Resources for a Judgmental Prophetic Theology 5. Dear Refugees: Come to my Home, Beat the Dog, Tear the Curtains 6. René Girard: Is Christianity a Myth? 7. Spreading the Blame: The West’s Exporting of Jihad 8. Patheos-Catholic... Read more

Dear Refugees: Come to my Home, Beat the Dog, Tear the Curtains

Last updated on: November 21, 2015 at 10:22 pm By Artur Rosman

This week we read letters from Sam Rocha‘s monthly mailbag. 1st Reading: As the visions during the night continued, I saw one like a Son of man coming . . . (Daniel 7:13) The bag sits just outside the news cycle hot-wash drycleaners, right around the corner from his favorite place to order wings fried hard as mierda like The Fugees do in The Score. Dear refugees, Come to my home, beat the dog, tear the curtains, let the water run, shoot... Read more

EXCLUSIVE: Longtime Immigration Lawyer & Pastor Explains the Refugee Process

Last updated on: November 22, 2015 at 10:29 am By Artur Rosman

Scott Hicks has practiced immigration law since 1995 and volunteered for many years before then. He is also Pastor at Red Lion United Methodist Church. ================================== I, Artur Rosman, am a refugee who in 1986 came to the United States with my parents from Poland via refugee camps in Italy. Even as a little child I was struck by the ponderous slowness and thoroughness of the process. I only wanted our family to finally get to the United States. We were... Read more

TOP10 SciFi Book & Film Resources for a Judgmental Prophetic Theology

Last updated on: November 18, 2015 at 3:18 pm By Artur Rosman

The SciFi genre is today’s incarnation of the prophetic tradition’s harsh and judgmental sayings of love. Yesterday’s post on the prophetic tradition in our times can be summarized as asking the following question: What happens when science and technology outstrip philosophy and ethics? The prophetic is the answer. Or, to be more precise, what the Girardian philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls the Jonah Paradox in The Mark of the Sacred. This concept is coextensive with what Anna Wierzbicka identifies in What Did... Read more

The Jonah Paradox: Is Humanity Living on Borrowed Time?

Last updated on: November 19, 2015 at 11:47 am By Artur Rosman

The Jonah Paradox, as conceived in Dupuy’s The Mark of the Sacred, is the existential mission of talking about the apocalypse, despite yourself, as if the inevitability of the apocalypse is written into the stone tablets of fate. Paradoxically this is done in the hope of indefinitely deferring the apocalypse. This paradox is something we need to come to terms with not only in the face of the Paris Attacks, but also in the face of the West’s unlimited military power.... Read more

Why Have Civilians Become Primary Jihadist Targets?

Last updated on: November 16, 2015 at 3:25 pm By Artur Rosman

There is nothing more heinous than the military targeting of innocent civilians like in the Paris Attacks. It goes against the venerable Just War tradition, which originated with St. Augustine. Just War ritualized war in order to prevent impure blood from watering furrows (generally with little success). The French Revolution was one of the first major explicit rejections in rhetoric and practice of this commendable (in theory) tradition. The Girardian theoretician Jean-Pierre Dupuy really sticks out his neck with regard to this topic at... Read more

Cosmos: Weakened Edition, 7

Last updated on: November 15, 2015 at 11:23 am By Artur Rosman

What’s not weak this week highlights the violent scapegoating origins of all human culture. 1. 4 Remedies for Fundamentalist vs. Atheist Starbucks Red Cup Wars 2. Patheos Catholic Manifesto: The Girard Option of Interdisciplinary Influence 3. Lux Aeterna: RIP René Girard (December 25, 1923 – Nov 4, 2015) 4. From Napoleon to Bin Laden: France and Modern Terrorism 5. A New Springtime for Hitler? 6. René Girard: Is Christianity a Myth? 7. Girard: Islamic Extremism is Symmetrically Related to Western Wealth 8. Just Another Atheist Jewish Catholic:... Read more

Is the Higher Education Turboencabulator Fixable?

Last updated on: November 13, 2015 at 2:23 pm By Artur Rosman

Higher education is broken. Nobody knows this better than people within humanities departments. This is always lost on those bent on scapegoating the fiction of Cultural Marxism, or some other phantom. It’s something I spoke about with my friend Dorothy Cummings McLean in a piece she did for the Catholic World Report: The funny thing is that theology departments are discovering gender theory as the next big thing just as humanities departments are trying to jettison them. The factions created... Read more

TOP10 Books: The Girard Option of Interdisciplinary Influence

Last updated on: November 12, 2015 at 12:10 pm By Artur Rosman

Bishop Robert Barron proposed René Girard (1923 – 2015) as a late modern Church Father in a piece published yesterday. This might seem hyperbolic, but it is really difficult to underestimate the immense range of the French theorist’s influence. This is what I would like to demonstrate today. If by their fruits you shall know them, then Girard is like an intellectual orchard. His influence is everywhere and shows how one need not shun one’s deeply and rationally held Catholic faith in... Read more

A New Springtime for Hitler?

Last updated on: November 11, 2015 at 2:29 pm By Artur Rosman

On Veterans Day it behooves us to take another look at Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. You will see how its discussion of the politics of history, how we remember and what we forget about the past, is timely for a world with immense ecological and refugee crises. I can’t even begin to describe the shock I felt when I first ran into Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers. I was born in... Read more