Paul J. Griffiths

You’ve asked me how to become an intellectual. You’re young, it seems (only young people ask questions of that kind), and you think you might have an intellectual vocation, but you can’t see what to do about it. What should you do in order to become the kind of person an intellectual is? What . . . . Continue Reading »

The Death Penalty, Volume Iby jacques derridatranslated by peggy kamufuniversity of chicago, 312 pages, $38 The Death Penalty, Volume IIby jacques derridatranslated by elizabeth rottenberguniversity of chicago, 304 pages, $45 Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishmentby carol s. . . . . Continue Reading »

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 »