Guest Post By Isaac Anderson Continued from yesterday. After we’ve gone our separate ways to work, the philosopher comes by my apartment for a beer. In addition to Descartes, this afternoon he taught Shakespeare, Sonnet 40. We walk out to the side yard, to a gazebo ringed with wood chips and dead leaves, gaze at the oaks wrapped in kudzu. I smoke American Spirits and he smokes a pipe and tells me about reading lines aloud to his students from... Read more
Guest Post By Isaac Anderson We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen. – Emerson The dissolution of a marriage is holographic, legible from many angles. This I remind myself two winters ago in January 2012, while eating dinner at a college in western North Carolina with a philosophy professor whose wife of eleven years has recently left him. It’s only our second real conversation, but we’ve hit it off. We sit in a booth in the dining... Read more
Give them rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine on them. The just will live in memory everlasting and will not be in fear of ill report. Thus begins the Solemn Requiem Mass that some Roman Catholics say on All Souls’ Day, when the Church prays for the dead. Historically, the Catholic tradition grew from a Jewish practice first performed after a battle described in the Second Book of Maccabees. According to the Maccabean story, so many faithful soldiers... Read more
In The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, Judith Shulevitz characterizes the Sabbath as a “not-doing in a not-place,” but not doing, as the freshmen in my honors colloquium class on the Sabbath discovered, can be quite productive. Before the first meeting of our class, the students completed this assignment: 1. Do nothing for a minute. 2. Write about the experience in exactly 250 words, not a word more or less. 3. After you complete steps 1... Read more
Winter is coming. All of northern Michigan seems to whisper the warning. The sun is slower to rise each day, and the mist clings to the lakes when I drive my children to school in the darkness. It’s not yet Halloween, but our neighbors have been anticipating the first snowfall since we arrived here in August, when it was ninety-two degrees and sunny. They look stern and offer advice (much-needed) on snow tires and Vitamin D supplements. I can’t help... Read more
I’ve been thinking about Genesis lately. In this past month, the lectionary included Eve’s succumbing to the serpent and my study group talked about the troubling fallout in perceptions of gender roles, about what might have happened if Eve hadn’t eaten the apple, about a human tendency toward disobedience. Today I’m thinking about certainty. Eve and Adam didn’t happen to simply miss curfew, or miss an animal-naming deadline; they ate of the tree of knowledge. Another discussion might consider the... Read more
For some months now, I have been ruminating on the writer John Podhoretz’s eulogy in Commentary magazine for his sister Rachel Abrams upon her death, from stomach cancer, at age sixty-two. Commentary effectively being the Podhoretz family house organ, and the Podhoretzes effectively being the mythological family of the origin of neoconservatism, the essay would be of interest to anyone interested in cultural and religious sociology—or at least to me. I, too, come from a family that has also tended... Read more
I’m a word-watcher. I like noticing which words are winning the popularity contest in our general culture, then tracing back how (and why) they achieved this winning position. Take “development.” Folks who were once “fundraisers” are now “development directors.” Formerly “backward” countries are now “developing countries.” The United Nations promotes “sustainable development.” And so on. “Development” is so popular because it connotes progress—a steady movement toward a worthy goal. But it didn’t begin life this way. Around 1600, “development” entered... Read more
Guest post by Tania Runyan I’ve clearly missed some important cultural boat, for people love so many things that I just simply don’t get. Beer, Star Wars, zombies, body piercings. While my friends devote themselves to these phenomena with cultish fervor, I look on with confusion, if not a little disgust. But the item that used to top my list? (Allow me a moment to duck.) Dogs. Oh, how I loathed them! Their indiscriminate, face-licking, feces-chomping ways. The agitation of... Read more
It was not out of sheer flattery that Thomas Merton compared Flannery O’Connor to Sophocles, for the things at which she stared were the very pulp and pith of humanity. Her ability to express metaphysical profundities through her native vernacular is nearly as impressive as the profundities themselves. For it is one thing to express sadness with the objective correlative of a weeping violet; it is another to express the Noumenon by way of a folksy, backwoods serial killer. In... Read more
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