F. P. Ramsey is hardly a household name, even among philosophers, not nearly so well-known as his brother, Michael, who became Archbishop of Canterbury. The TLS reviewer of Frank Ramsey (1903-1930): A Sister’s Memoir captures something of his astonishing brilliance: “In Cambridge in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Reviewing Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch in the New York Times Book Review , Stephen King - who knows about big books - reflects on the challenges of writing big novels: “Such a prodigious investment of time and talent indicates an equally prodigious amount of ambition, but surely there . . . . Continue Reading »
N.T. Wright’s long-awaited forthcoming Paul and the Faithfulness of God is full of juicy little polemics, few juicier than this one: “the scholarly construct of a ‘parousia’ in which the space-time universe would cease to exist, followed by the second-order construct of a . . . . Continue Reading »
Latour, speaking of the reductionisms of critical thought ( We Have Never Been Modern ): “The critics have developed three distinct approaches to talking about our world: naturalization, socialization and deconstruction. Let us use E.O. Wilson, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Derrida — a . . . . Continue Reading »
Bruno Latour ( We Have Never Been Modern ) explains why there isn’t, or shouldn’t be, an anthropology of modernity: “In works produced by anthropologists abroad, you wil l not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated. If the analyst is subtle, she . . . . Continue Reading »
In his essay on Augustine in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity , a precis of his Augustine and the Trinity , Lewis Ayres offers two lovely quotations illustrating Augustine’s pneumatology. He begins with one from the final book of The Trinity and follows with one from Augustine’s . . . . Continue Reading »
In his recent An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (8-9), Bruno Latour gives this pithy summary of the argument of his now-classic We Have Never Been Modern : “I sought to give a precise meaning to the overly polysemic word ‘modern’ by using as a . . . . Continue Reading »
In his contribution to Social Change and Modernity , Jeffrey C. Alexander surveys “differentiation theory” from Durkheim to Weber to Parsons to recent studies. In the end, he admits that “Even in relatively developed countries, the autonomy of the societal community—its . . . . Continue Reading »
In his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism , Steven Connor suggests that “The most striking difference between modernism and postmodernism is that, though both depend upon forms of publicity, few guides or introductions to modernism appeared until it was felt to be over. . . . . Continue Reading »
That subject heading sounds like a title for a post on cutting-edge Trinitarian theology. Not so. Following Richard Cross, Holmes points out ( The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History and Modernity , 136-7) that Augustine was suspicious of substance as a category for . . . . Continue Reading »
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