Me: OK, a bunch of different issues or approaches here, let’s take them one at a time. 1) “Reasoning oneself into faith”: Eh? Not totally sure what this means. I wasn’t raised Christian. I was pretty hostile to Christianity. Therefore, I had a lot of misconceptions about what Christianity actually entailed, a lot of anti-Christian beliefs that I needed to realize were wrong, and a great reluctance to consider Christianity worthy of my attention. Once I had figured out that... Read more

Don’t you know I got the blogwatch boys out Changing someone’s facial design…. BuzzMachine: Interview with Salam Pax. Camassia and Noli Irritare Leones: How do you know that your Redeemer lives? There’s some good stuff in these posts. I have nothing in particular to add except that Anselm’s getting a bad rap here w/r/t atonement. I really don’t have time to get into this, but my understanding of his position (which I find super-convincing, and, as I’ve said many times... Read more

TOTALLY FASCINATING LEGAL-THEORY DEBATE between Lawrence Solum and Jack Balkin. They’re operating well above my level of competence, so I won’t comment much, just point you to the two sites. Should offer food for thought no matter what your jurisprudential theory. My only comment so far is that Balkin’s posts also stand as an oblique answer to my long series on jurisprudence, though he doesn’t address two of the points I thought were pretty important (philosopher-kings, and limits of judicial... Read more

READER ERIC ENLOW WRITES that my admittedly highly unsympathetic description of “blessed assurance,” below, was unfair and uninformed. That may well be true–I was basing my understanding of the idea on what a very sweet, very devout, but not very theologically-inclined woman told me about it. I may have misunderstood her words, or she may have been misunderstanding it herself. I stand by the claim that lots of people do in fact hold the belief I described, and that it... Read more

NEW SUPERMAN OFFERS AN ANTI-AMERICAN HERO. My Jewish World Review column. Read more

“These students, like the rest of their generation, were different from my generation in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and... Read more

“ELECTION“: Saw this over the weekend. Highly recommended. Very funny. Themes of moral weakness, difference between our self-images and who we really are. Be forewarned though, it earned its R rating. Read more

“Is this how it all started? Was it the day we were sitting at his dining room table, greedily biting into our forbidden ham-and-cheese sandwich and calling it a croque monsieur? At some point we must have caught the same expression of ravenous, unadulterated pleasure in each other’s eyes, because we started to laugh simultaneously. I raised my glass of water to him and said, Who would have thought that such a simple meal would appear to us like a... Read more

POETRY WEDNESDAY/FRIDAY: As part of my warming-up exercises for writing fiction, I sometimes write Spenserian stanzas about the characters I’ll be dealing with. The tight form of the stanza forces me to carve out phrases I wouldn’t come to without the formal constraints, and imposes a precision and compression on my language that is generally alien to novelists (esp. in the age of 500-plus page blockbusters). Here’s one for a piece that may or may not eventually be titled “Mexican... Read more

“EYEBALL IN MY MARTINI” UPDATE! Long-term fans know that although I am adept at teasing out the theological subtexts of the Cramps’ “Eyeball in My Martini,” I did not quite catch all the lyrics. I can now fill in the gaps. I went to the Institute And asked the doctor there In the department of eyeballs What’s this burden that I bear? Emphasis added. Read more