Eve Tushnet
“Much like the beans, the tomato may seem like an optional garnish; I assure you, it is not.” Read more
“Much like the beans, the tomato may seem like an optional garnish; I assure you, it is not.” Read more
Onion headline. Ouch. Read more
to point you to The Groom’s Family, a blog by a Jewish convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, who is currently doing a series on the book From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933 – 1965. Read more
If you have confronted some serious inadequacies in your understanding of the world, and have one or a few candidates for possible alternative understandings, but feel stuck, constantly noodling with meta-questions and “But how can I know for sure?” and never actually getting to the point where you change your life… here are some things you might try. 1. Ask a new question. The one I really like is, “Which of my possible beliefs and actions are kind of banal,... Read more
“Though we think the real unsung hero of this story was his audience. If he was preaching the whole time he was walking around headless, then somebody was presumably listening. We have enormous respect for anyone who sees a headless guy walking toward them with blood spurting from a ragged neck stump, carrying a head that is offering them an inspirational message of salvation, and is able to actually listen to and absorb what the head is saying.” Cracked, so... Read more
Imagine: The Pope doesn’t have a story about how he became Catholic. No one would take that as evidence (I don’t think) that he’s not really. If I were to ask, e.g., “is the Pope really a Catholic?”, no one would answer with his conversion story. The evidence I’d be understood as asking for isn’t a story about how he chose Catholicism. There’d be certain acts or facts that would count as evidence in that case. –the rest is here;... Read more
image removed, sorry Read more
in which I say that sociology is not the queen of the sciences. Read more
The point of writing history is not… somehow to cleanse ourselves, as it were, of the taint of the past–the humanist/Reformation/Enlightenment project of exposing the past as past and cordoning it off behind the fence of anachronism. Rather, it is to allow ourselves still to be touched by the past. –Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton Brown; via Millinerd Read more
a really excellent essay from William T. Cavanaugh. Excerpt: But what is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as “secular.” It is this story that I will challenge here. I will do so in two steps. First, I will show that the division of ideologies and institutions into the categories “religious” and “secular” is an arbitrary... Read more
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