Huston Smith once lectured on world religions to highly enghusiastic officers at Maxwell Air Force Base. Why were they so enthusiastic? he wondered. His answer: “as a unit they were concerned because someday they were likely tyo be dealing with the peoples they were studying as . . . . Continue Reading »
Charles Keyes writes of the imposition of Western conceptions of “religion”on Asia: “In pursuit of ‘progress’ free from primordial attachments the rulers of [the] modern states[s] of East and South East Asia have all instituted policies toward religious institutions. . . . . Continue Reading »
What does language do? Refer? Communicate concepts? Affect action? Yes, but, according to Merleau-Ponty, with all of these doings of language it never loses its basic link to gesture and sound. Language never loses its affective dimension, never loses its musicality. . . . . Continue Reading »
Imagination, David Abram argues (following Merleau-Ponty), is not “a separate mental faculty” but “the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense . . . . Continue Reading »
Having spent time among shamans and magicians in Nepal and Indonesia, David Abram ( The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World ) concluded that magicians are marginal figures, but in a different sense than is usually understood. Rather than standing at the . . . . Continue Reading »
Faustus doesn’t believe that the Old Testament provides testimonies of Christ, and Augustine sets out to prove him wrong: “The ark was three hundred cubits long so that, all told, it was six times fifty cubits, just as all the time of this world is stretched out over six ages, in all of . . . . Continue Reading »
INTRODUCTION No family exists in isolation from the rest of the world. Our children have friends, many go to school; eventually they will leave home for good. We should train them so that when they leave, they are led out by the Spirit. THE TEXT “There is therefore now no . . . . Continue Reading »
Romans 8:10-11: If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit . . . . Continue Reading »
What makes for better health and longer life expectancy in the advanced world in the last century? Not improvements in medicine, Illich argues. Rates of tuberculosis, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles indicate that “nearly 90 percent of the total decline in . . . . Continue Reading »
Ivan Illich ( Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health ) writes about the unintended effects of insecticides in Borneo: “Insecticides used in villages to control malaria vectors also accumulated in cockroaches, most of which are resistant. Geckoes fed on these, . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
