thoughts in and out of season
Michael Blowhard moseys though a discussion of G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, notes that part of his argument (the part MB likes), boils down to “Why, that’s how things have always seemed to me!”, and then asks “What do people really find appealing about Western-style monotheism? What emotional/imaginative thing does it serve?” Why, in other … More ...
Kathy Shaidle has been grousing that none of the young guys killed in the West Virginia Tech shooting did anything to resist getting blown away and young conservative guys are defending them.
She touches on part of the explanation in her most recent comment, to the effect that you don’t have to be a … More ...
Jacques Lyotard, a prominent postmodernist, has this to say about the status of knowledge in modernity:
“Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age. This transition has been under way since at … More ...
My publisher tells me they want my book to be a bit more coherent and a little less vague, so I’m busily unscrambling arguments, tightening up prose, and adding examples and such. As a result, posting is likely to be sporadic for a while.
In the meantime, I was inspired by Michael Blowhard’s link to … More ...
Steve Sailer has a couple of interesting pieces on Obama and his identity issues. Reminds me a bit of someone I once knew, a black man with a Christian mother and Muslim convert father whose marriage broke up over religious and other incompatibilities. He was intelligent, extremely disciplined, attentive to what others were looking … More ...
The issue is secularization. The term has many definitions and contours, and many have offered various descriptions and explanations.
Steven Weinberg is a Nobel particle physicist, working presently at the University of Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Weinberg
Weinberg recently published a piece in the Times Literary Supplement in which he claims 1. a loss of religious “certitude” in … More ...
A basic question that’s attracted surprisingly little discussion in spite of its obvious social importance is why so many people not only let religion slide practically but deny it as a theoretical matter. Their apparent claim is that one part of a universe that arose by chance and means nothing can interpret that universe correctly … More ...
Tufts materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote a book entitled “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.”
David Hart reviewed the book in the January issue of First Things, “Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark.”
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5428
The thesis of Dennett’s book is that the “phenomenon of religion” arose as the result of natural evolutionary biology, and … More ...
Anthony Esolen visits one of the few surviving men’s colleges and finds it a hotbed of benign timocracies. Fine upstanding young men, sense of honor, all that sort of thing. From his account it seems that education really can make a difference, and people can bounce back and start acting normal again if given … More ...
Arthur Schlesinger, a fine embodiment of modern liberal stasis, died last week. Schlesinger, along with JK Galbraith, represented that satisfied liberalism that died an unnoticed death sometime in the late 60’s or early 70’s. Figures like Schlesinger and Galbraith—and the brand of liberalism they represented—became instantly irrelevant during that time, although they personally never caught … More ...