Kant claims that philosophy got off to a bad start when the word itself stopped being used in a strict sense to name a wissenschaflichen Lebensweisheit and is transferred to speculation and mysticism. As Derrida summarizes the point (Raising the Tone of Philosophy), “no harm would have happened, no mystagogic speculation would have been credible or efficient, nothing or no one would have detoned in philosophy without this errance of the name far from the thing, and if the relation... Read more

Derrida parodies Kant’s “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy” with his late essay, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’ (published, with Kant’s essay, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy. Kant’s essay criticizes the mystagogues who have taken over philosophy, those who appeal to some sort of secret revelation, some intuition of the truth, some access beyond the veil. This lends a tone of superiority that is out of place in philosophy. The superior tone is the “death... Read more

In a sermon on “Catholic Unity,” delivered in 1844, John Williamson Nevin announced the end of “Protestantism”—of the knee-jerk anti-Catholicism that, he said, did as much damage to the Reformation as the errors it opposed. “It is not enough now,” he declared, “simply to cry out against popery and puseyism, as a return to exploded errors. The truth as it wrought mightily in the souls of the reformers, must be understood as well as felt. There is an opposition to... Read more

In his 1888 treatise on Christian Charity in the Ancient Church (7-9), Gerhard Uhlhorn contrasts pagan liberality with Christian charity. He acknowledges that pagan liberality was considerable, but that did not make it identical to the Christian virtue. “Liberality is the heathen virtue which corresponds to the compassionate love, the caritas of Christianity; but it is just as different from that love as is heathendom itself from Christianity. The compassionate love of the Christian looks at necessity as the first thing;... Read more

Back in 1934, Walter Dill Scott, president of Northwestern, already anticipated  distance education: “The university of twenty-five years from now will be a different looking place, says President Scott of Northwestern. Instead of concentrating faculty and students around a campus, they will ‘commute’ by air, and the university will be surrounded by airports and hangars. The course will be carried on, to a large extent, by radio and pictures. Facsimile broadcasting and television will enlarge greatly the range of a library;... Read more

College costs keep rising, but Kathleen Parker argues that the more serious problem is that students are no longer getting “much bang for their buck.”  Parker sites a study from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that criticizes colleges for “an increasing lack of academic rigor, grade inflation, high administrative costs and a lack of intellectual diversity.” She describes the problem as “a breach of trust between colleges and the students they attract with diversions and amenities that have little... Read more

Lamentations 3:43-44 are set in parallel: A. You covered yourself with anger and pursued us B. You have slain and not spared A’. You have covered yourself with a cloud B’. So that no prayer can pass through. Both A sections speak of Yahweh hiding Himself behind a veil – first of anger and then a cloud. The B sections are also parallel: The prayers that cannot pass through are prayers for rescue, prayers like “Spare me!” The parallelism of... Read more

“Let him give his cheek to the smiter, let him be filled with reproach” (Lamentations 3:30). In context, Jeremiah is speaking of afflicted Israel, which he himself embodies as the prophet. “I have hope in Him,” Jeremiah writes (v. 24) and then turns to a meditation on the value of suffering in youth: It is good to wait silently, good to bear burdens while young. The response to affliction is silence sitting in the dust, offering the cheek to the... Read more

From the beginning of the Bible, sanctuaries and buildings and other enclosed places are conceived of as feminine. Eve is “built” (banah) from the rib of Adam; the first “architecture” in the world is the woman.  Throughout the Torah, we find analogies between sanctuary and bed. Yahweh dwells behind curtains, and it is a dangerous sacrilege to penetrate the veil into His presence. Likewise, sexual sin is described as “uncovering the nakedness” of a woman (Leviticus 18), drawing back her... Read more

Patricia Ryberg, Assistant Professor of Biology at Park University has been studying tree fossils buried under a mile of ice in the Antarctic. She discovered that “the pattern of growth in the Antarctic tree samples showed habits typically associated with evergreen trees. However, the fossilized leaf impressions demonstrated what appeared to have been a matting effect, layers of plant tissue indicative of a forest shedding all of its leaves at once: a deciduous forest. The research would seem to suggest then that... Read more