Paul J. Griffiths

Richard Rodriguez has been an occasional companion of mine for more than thirty years, since the publication of Hunger of Memory in 1982. I feel I know him well enough, in part because so much of his writing is autobiographical; but until last September, I’d known him only on the page. Then I . . . . Continue Reading »

Robert Bellah understands religion as an activity that takes us beyond the quotidian. The everyday world is ordered by lack, of food, shelter, sex, and so on; it is a world of demand and pressure and need. The non-quotidian world is ordered by excess; it is a world of play and sleep and is . . . . Continue Reading »

In his interestingly wrong-headed essay, Paul Miller argues that there are extraterritorial evils so great that they oblige the United States to intervene militarily to preempt them when they threaten, to put a stop to them when they’ve already begun, and to redress their consequences when . . . . Continue Reading »

A Response to Patrick J. . . . . Continue Reading »

The Sense of an Ending ?by Julian Barnes ?Knopf, 163 pages, $23.95 You’re not the person you take yourself to be. That’s because the person you take yourself to be is a creature of narrative, and narratives are inevitably fabulous and fabricated, which is at least to say that they are . . . . Continue Reading »

Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar by Paul Griffiths CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, 235 PAGES, $24.95 All men desire to know, said Aristotle at the beginning of his Metaphysics . Paul Griffiths, with his new book Intellectual Appetite , has set out to discipline and deepen that . . . . Continue Reading »

A Very Brief History of Eternity by Carlos Eire Princeton, 258 pages, $24.95 Carlos Eire, A Yale professor and the author of the 2003 National Book Award winner Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy , is clearly capable of remembering and writing about the smells and tastes and . . . . Continue Reading »

This is the monstrosity in love, lady,” Troilus tells Cressida in Shakespeare’s play, “that the will is infinite and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.” Human desire, in other words, is doubly infinite: We are perpetually unsatisfied when we . . . . Continue Reading »

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart Yale, 249 pages, $28 At the center of David Bentley Hart’s brilliant new book is an account of the Christian revolution, by which he means the gradual but radical and dramatic replacement of the . . . . Continue Reading »

In May, Steven Pinker published in the New Republic a jeremiad against dignity as a tool of thought in bioethics. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, works at the interface of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and psychology. He is, like most of that kind of psychologist, a . . . . Continue Reading »