I did not expect that reposting “To What Degree is First Things Responsible for Iraq?” would cause a minor storm. The fact of the matter appears to be, according to Damon Linker, that First Things was giving an imprimatur to a fait accompli. The damage had already been done by the warmongering of the older NeoCon press. Not that the old guard NC’s don’t have Catholics on their boards. The lasting damage of all of these political engagements lies in... Read more
No, this isn’t about Stephen Herreid. He seems to have gone into writing exile after realizing how much he encouraged my freeloading. Instead I have something for those who are wondering, after reading yesterday’s post (Beauty, Postmodernism, and Vodka), what Gregory Wolfe is doing to keep artists from starving in garrets. Besides publishing IMAGE Journal for over 25 years he also recently started the Slant imprint with my personal favorite: Wipf & Stock Publishers. So far Slant has published Erin McGraw’s... Read more
Gregory Wolfe has spent half a lifetime saying “Beauty will save the world.” Czeslaw Milosz once said “Heaven is the third vodka.” ============================================================== UPDATE: The complete Gregory Wolfe interview is now available on Ethika Politika! ============================================================== See how these two things come together below. Cosmos the in Lost and its evil twin Rabelaisian Catholicism have frequently waded into the waters of the Catholic Literature debate. Even more, they have ventured into appraising the state of Catholic cultural production overall. See... Read more
French history, and a little bit of American international relations, have been the main focus of my last few meditations. All of them have been related to recent Western perceptions of Islam. Recent is the key word, because these perceptions have shifted considerably over time and have by no means been always tilted toward seeing it as exclusively violent. What’s more, the harms inflicted by the West upon Islam ought to be remembered if we are not to buy into... Read more
Christians who give into their fears of their opponents miss out on a lot of great insights. This maxim also holds most for books that are labelled anti-Christian for whatever reason. For example, Rene Girard demonstrated in his I See Satan Fall Like Lightning there is much to learn about Christianity and its strange commitment to the weak from Nietzsche. A more recent example of being all wrong about all the right things is Mark Lilla’s once much discussed, now all... Read more
Like amber national anthems preserve monstrosities from the past. Frequently this past humbles the clean self-image of an age. For example, read the following words from the French national anthem: To arms, citizens / Form your battalions/ Let’s march, let’s march! / Let an impure blood / Water our furrows! How odd is it that the Westerners who, according to Steven Pinker, are supposedly getting progressively less violent by listening to their better angels should still sing this in public. Aren’t they in... Read more
Michel Houellebecq is on the front cover of this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo. It might not be immediately clear what a novelist whose last work published in English, The Map and the Territory –the review bore the title “From Cocks to Corpses“–might have to offer Catholic or Christian (let’s not confuse the two) audiences. It is my hard and fast contention that a theologically firmly grounded audience can draw out big insights from his work. A case in point is my first... Read more
Why is it when a small group of religious fanatics kill innocent people it’s a crime against humanity and a testimony against ALL religious people? But why is it when secular Western governments bomb the merde out of thousands of innocents it’s acceptable collateral damage in the name of freedom? Twitter is a limited medium for articulating complicated thoughts. For the very same reason Twitter is the perfect medium for articulating stereotypes such as the one above. The following tweet cuts... Read more
Yesterday’s piece on Ryan Bell (the pastor who became an atheist) made it seem like the Friendly Atheist demythologized the pastor’s conversion by focusing on the confirmation bias built into his project. There wasn’t enough space to discuss the rest of the piece. The following passage from the piece betrays an epistemological naivete: So, over the past year, Bell critically analyzed the beliefs he grew up with — and professed from the pulpit — and realized that the evidence just... Read more
“Nothing will come from nothing,” says King Lear, habitually plagiarizing a tradition that goes back as Parmenides. With this I will continue my engagement with confirmation bias and how it applies to recent news stories about about atheists and skeptics. I will enlist the help of the story, “A Year After Giving Atheism a Try, Former Pastor Ryan Bell Admits: ‘I Don’t Think That God Exists‘” in my argument. Freedom, choice, and will might be American staples, but the power of... Read more
Cosmos The In Lost
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