It’s impossible to ignore all the signposts of the Christmas season—wherever you go the sights and sounds are unambiguously evocative of the holiday season. Still, sometimes as powerful as the familiar Christmas imagery is the impulse to secularize the holiday—to pull . . . . Continue Reading »
"Socially crippled" — strangely, this phrase appears to be kosher while regular-old-crippled is out ("differently abled, thank you"). Either way, at Slate, William Saletan is raising a ruckus over the notion that "appearance alone can be grounds for a potentially . . . . Continue Reading »
Jeffrey Kripal is the latest professor of religious studies to come out, in good modern style, writing off Christianity (and presumably Judaism) as a pooped-out and poopy old farce for stunted schmucks who worship, in Aldous Huxley’s (Joycean, not Blakean) phrase, "Old Noboddady." . . . . Continue Reading »
Our own Peter Lawler is the James Brown of the blogosphere, the hardest working man in the business. Over at the the Encyclopedia Britannica blog , he argues that a "postmodernism, rightly understood" is essentially a realism that counters our modern tendency towards . . . . Continue Reading »
The great contest is over the culture, the guiding ideas and habits of mind and heart that inform the way we understand the world and our place in it. Christians who, knowingly or unknowingly, embrace the model of “Christ without culture”—meaning Christianity in indifference to culture—are . . . . Continue Reading »
Thru Walter Olson at Secular Right , I perused this morning the Buckley-hosted Sharon Statement , "adopted in conference at Sharon, Connecticut, on 11 September 1960." Olson wanted to get this point across: the statement’s choice of language can also be seen as a deft stroke of . . . . Continue Reading »
"I hold that life is intensely painful but that the good man does not complain." "I suppose you read that in a book?" "No, sir. It struck me quite personally." "Then your idea of perfect happiness is to meet the maximum of pain with the minimum of complaint?" . . . . Continue Reading »
Larry Arnhart is surely the best proponent of Darwinian Conservatism, and not just because he has a blog with the same name. In his view, an evolutionary biological account of nature properly captures our intellectual and moral capacities, the emergence of consciousness itself, and grounds a . . . . Continue Reading »
Since I first started blogging at Postmodern Conservative several years ago, I have been picking away, in extremely unsystematic style, at answering this question — largely because I’ve been thinking it through as I’ve been going along. I think that’s a feature, not a bug . . . . Continue Reading »
Adam Kirsch has an extraordinary takedown of Slavoj Zizek at The New Republic, and this is the first of a few things I’ll say about parts of it. So: the passage in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle where Zizek discusses the ideological function of Nazi anti-Semitism: "one could say that even if . . . . Continue Reading »
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