The post “John Gray: Waiting for an Atheist Morality is Like Waiting for Godot” sparked something resembling a debate the last two days. Some of it was very constructive. Some of it was like this: The funniest thing about it, besides the racism (atheists aren’t magically immune apparently), is how the anonymous writer is hiding behind a screen name derived from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s funny because, first of all, Dorian Gray shares a last name with John... Read more
John Gray is one of our most fascinating public intellectuals and one heck of a muckraker. He likes to take on all comers in a Voltarian fashion. This is why he is featured on my Ethika Politika post “Neither Nye Nor Gopnik: 10 Atheists Who Engage Religion Charitably.” I put Gray’s Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions on that list. Now he has a new book coming, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom. It’s going to be... Read more
The University of Chicago is no doubt one of the most dynamic academic institutions in the United States. It is known as a magnet for not only American scholars, but also many noteworthy intellectual imports from Germany, Poland, and France. Not exactly without merit the university has also earned a reputation as the home of the ruthless Chicago School of Economics, which puts the “dismal” in the “dismal science.” At the same time the university has hosted scholars such as Paul... Read more
Anniversaries are traditionally reserved for tallying gains and losses. It’s hard to believe two years and three days have passed since the conclave that elected Francis, which took place after Benedict XVI abdicated on my thirty-fifth birthday. When I crunch my numbers on Francis he comes out much more ahead than behind. Let’s look at his gains first: LOVE 1. Style: I immediately took to Papa Bergoglio’s off the cuff Rabelaisian style. It undermines all expectations of the pope... Read more
Michael Novak is at it again. He cannot help defending the foolish decisions the Bush administration made in Iraq. Note the heapings of self-righteous purity and breast-beating in the following words from his piece Why We Went to Iraq and Should Have Stayed There: More than once in the last couple of years others have continued criticism and even insisted that I apologize for being in favor of the Iraq War in 2003. There are very strong moral reasons why... Read more
Last week I introduced you to Fabrice Hadjadj whose Faith of the Demons which is not available in English, only in Polish and Spanish translations, and the French original, Foi des démons ou l’athéisme dépassé. Hadjadj pulls off one of the most devious moves in all of writing with the setup I’m going to tell you about. He develops his theory of Satan as a being whose domain lies in tempting us into a pure spirituality. The analysis owes a lot to the work... Read more
Of making many books there is no end: and much study is an affliction of the flesh. One of the dangers of reading books is finding other very important books that you simply must read in order to understand the books you are already reading. This is how I got trapped into going to graduate school. My parents once bought an anthology of American poets. It was a high school anthology, I think. I did not read most of the... Read more
Nietzsche’s Antichrist is on my all time favorite novels for a particular reason. His writing cannot always be taken as pure philosophy since many of the things he says are fictitious. The genre of fiction deflects much more of the interpretive task onto its readers than philosophy. On the other hand, philosophers tend to speak with authority, because they want their readers to believe what they say in some way corresponds to the way things are. Fiction, on the other... Read more
Last week I wrote about the one novel you need to read this year. Now it’s out of stock at amazon. Coincidence? Probably. This week I’ll write about the one Lent book you must have, but can’t have, because it’s only available in French, Spanish, and Polish. You’ll have to content yourself with my Lent reading suggestions. Now, after thinking about the supposed secularity of Quebec in comparison to Holy Mother Russia I questioned the validity of applying straightforward statistical methods... Read more
Quebec is usually cited as one of the most shocking examples of rapid secularization. The process was worrisome enough to draw Charles Taylor from writing about Hegel and epistemology into interpreting secularity in books such as A Secular Age and Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. In response to my musings on Putin’s continuity with Russian history and the report on the statistical state of Orthodoxy my friend Jean-Francois came up with the following surprising conclusion going off of these numbers:... Read more
Cosmos The In Lost
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In