— 1 — When I was little, one of my favorite things to read was the science magazine Muse, but I’ve finally found a suitable substitute for adults. After poking around on the Nautilus website, I finally became a subscriber, and had a wonderful time reading my first print magazine. A number of their articles and blog posts have turned up in my Quick Takes over the last few months, and I strongly suspect a bunch of my readers (and your children,... Read more
I finished Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments hexalogy this week when I reached the end of City of Heavenly Fire, and I’m awfully frustrated. This series hit the same problem a number of epic books and movies have been causing for me: I’m tired of reading another story where possible outcomes are either the death of everyone on earth (and possibly associated worlds/dimensions) or the happily ever after. It makes it pretty darn easy to guess what the answer is going to... Read more
Sam Harris has announced the winning entry in his contest for critiques of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. The winner (from a philosophy M.A. and blogger at Point of Controversy) is the obvious complaint, which seems just. Here’s an excerpt: First, your analogy between epistemic axioms and moral axioms fails. The former merely motivate scientific inquiry and frame its development, whereas the latter predetermine your science of morality’s most basic findings. Epistemic axioms direct science to favor... Read more
In 2014, I’m reading and blogging through Pope Francis/Cardinal Bergoglio’s Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. Every Monday, I’ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. In this week’s chapter of Open Mind, Faithful Heart, Pope Francis braids together three moments in Christ’s ministry: his discoverty by the Magi, his baptism, and the wedding at Cana. As Francis tells it, these stories are all about Christ inviting us forward to... Read more
So far, when I’ve used Jen Fulwiler’s Saint Generator to pick a saint to learn about and from for the month, I’ve mostly pulled saints I hadn’t heard of before, from times and places that are very far from me. Today, when I visited her randomizer, it spun up a saint I already love very much: Saint Maximilian Kolbe. I think the first time I heard of him was in RCIA (people in the class were supposed to pick out... Read more
— 1 — My facebook friends are the kind of people who are patient with me when I post things like, “Oy, where is that quote about the problem with cat burning not being that it’s bad for the cat but bad for the spectators?” But even their patience has a limit. One friend supplied the quote I was looking for (“Macaulay said that the Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave... Read more
Why do people have so much contempt for “the Friendzone”? Part of the problem is that we’ve defined romantic love as the highest form of emotional and physical intimacy, so missing out on dating feels like missing out on communion. At The American Conservative, I’m talking a little about this problem in “Our Starved for Touch Culture.” In the wake of the Santa Barbara shootings, the unpleasant underbelly of the pickup artist community (PUA), involuntary celibates (incels), and other unhealthy... Read more
I don’t follow the opera world, but critics made enough of a stir about the attractiveness (insufficient, in their judgement) of a mezzo-soprano in an English production Der Rosenkavalier for the conversation to cross over to the mainstream media. The NYT brought together two classical music reviewers to comment, and I was particularly struck by this analysis by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim: [O]pera has a complicated history of celebrating and exploiting women, and I can’t help feeling that the gentlemen of the... Read more
Debates over net neutrality tend to be a bit abstract and hypothetical for consumers. Net neutrality had been the status quo for the internet since we all started using it, so, thinking of the consequences of changing this standard requires making an imaginative leap. That’s why I did a walk through of the Amazon/Hachette fight for The American Conservative this week and traced out the way it foreshadows fights between ISPs and websites: Amazon’s War Is First in a Series The... Read more
This past Friday, I had the pleasure of being a guest on Rebecca Cherico’s radio program “Conversion Keeps Happening” on Radio Maria. Rebecca is the editor of Atheist to Catholic: 11 Stories of Conversion, so you can probably guess the topic of our interview. You can listen to the conversation here. The focus is on my conversion story, but, as most of you can probably guess, we manage to take a number of semi-on-topic excursions to discuss the Yale... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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