We pretty much have everything back in place here at Cosmos The In Lost. The site still might go through a theme overhaul, but we’re sticking with what we have for right now. There will be a preview of upcoming book reviews tomorrow. Promise. Today we bring you a guest post from The City and the World on the recent death–there’s something offensively insubstantial about the euphemism “passing”–of Seamus Heaney. We caught the Irish bard in time several weeks ago... Read more
Paul Elie says all the great novelists are dead. But he’s dead wrong! I’ve recently discovered that Randy Boyagoda resurrected Elie’s argument in the latest issue of First Things here. He starts out by venting: “I’m sick of Flannery O’Connor. I’m also sick of Walker Percy, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Dostoevsky. Actually, I’m sick of hearing about them from religiously minded readers. These tend to be the... Read more
The last installment of this blog broached Paul Elie’s claim that fiction has lost its faith. Elie’s attack seemed to limit itself (wisely?) to the novel. It’s possible he didn’t think poetry has lost its faith. My response also went against the grain of Rachel Held Evans and her claim that Christians must assimilate because they have fallen off the cliff of respectable mainstream intellectual culture. Paul Elie probably meant to exclude poetry from his accusations of faithlessness, because it took me several hours... Read more
Only two days left to take advantage of these savings. Read more
The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) is widely read in American poetry circles. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that many Americans almost think of him as one of their own (Cynthia Haven even documents his worldwide influence here). Now Milosz’s poetry appeals to me because he interprets his experience of late modern America and early 20th century totalitarianism with a finely honed Catholic theological imagination. Don’t take my word for it. There’s plenty of evidence for my... Read more
I’m around 35 (!) and I can’t say whether I qualify as millennial. But fear not, recent studies suggest millennials remember much less than senior citizens. So let’s pretend that I am one, because they won’t know the difference anyway. I also don’t remember when I wrote my first essay, but it was with a pencil, because my parents couldn’t afford to have me throwing away paper (we lived in the projects of Detroit). By the time I graduated from... Read more
The original Rachel Held-Evans piece can be found here: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/27/why-millennials-are-leaving-the-church/ This blog’s reply to RHE is now available here: http://cosmostheinlost.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/confession-how-i-lost-my-faith-after-reading-rachel-held-evans/ Read more
Albert Camus was nearly as unfaithful as Jean-Paul Sartre . . . to atheism. This should not be especially surprising to any semi-conscious reader of his novels. Despite his good existentialist intentions Camus could never really get beyond good and evil. Most of his literary works collapse under the weight of trying to cover up their origins in, and direct debts to, classical Christian doctrines, especially Original Sin. It’s as if he keeps trying to roll a rock to seal off... Read more
Myth-busting 101 with Robert Louis Wilken. Read more
Jean-Luc Marion is a Catholic philosopher, some say the greatest living philosopher, who studied under Jacques Derrida. If nothing else, he is one of the best arguments for religious parents not shielding their kids from the “secular” academe. I’ve made this argument borrowing from my own experience here. After all, the influence goes both ways. Derrida spent the last decade or two of his life engaging Marion and the tradition of negative theology in books such as Acts of Religion... Read more
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