Charles Taylor’s monumental (or at least huge) A Secular Age is, I suppose, old news already, but, as usual, it has taken me a long time to figure out how to undo Taylor with his own statements, and so now of course I have to share. Finally I’ve figured out this out, and I thought you . . . . Continue Reading »
Do read Alan Jacobs on Obama at Notre Dame. Because the clump-of-cells argument is so crude and ‘final’, Obama, putting himself at the front of a long train, seeks refuge in bad postmodernity. Rather than overdetermining the abortion question as a question of science — and this, . . . . Continue Reading »
The success of Dan Brown’s “message,” Ross writes in his latest column, cant be separated from its dishonesty. The secret history of Christendom that unspools in The Da Vinci Code is false from start to finish . The lost gospels are real enough, but . . . . Continue Reading »
The latest issue of Modern Age (Winter 2009) is now available for general consumption and features a symposium on Remi Bragues amazingly erudite book The Law of God . Besides a very fine lead contribution from Mark Shiffman (who blogs over at Front Porch Republic ) youll also find short . . . . Continue Reading »
One thing that’s always unfashionable is pessimism about the Power of Love. I touched a bit on love yesterday, and I see today that Daniel did the same a few days before that — in the context of another go against our love-projecting cosmopolitans. Where the cosmops would seek, . . . . Continue Reading »
The Immanent Frame, an academic blog launched on the release of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age , is still going strong. They’ve started a new discussion series , replete with invited scholars, centered around Obama’s traditionalistic inaugural claim that the “values upon . . . . Continue Reading »
Andrew has a fairly careful and modest essay at the Times on the progress of religious faith in the face of scientific progress. The issue of whether faith should gird us to not fear scientific truth is an intriguing one; the Holocaust was scientifically true, after all, meaning the facts could not . . . . Continue Reading »
There are two models of rapture — one super-worldly, one this-worldly, one in which we are abducted, from here to eternity, and one in which we are inducted, to infinity and beyond. The first model is depressing if it’s the only opportunity we have to experience eternity. Even the . . . . Continue Reading »
Conservatives, postmodern and otherwise, often discuss the difficulties associated with the sometimes promiscuous assignment and declaration of rights in political discourse today. If we look at the American founding narrowly from the perspective of its Lockean influence, its easy to see the . . . . Continue Reading »
Im spending the morning (and now part of the afternoon) on one of those fancy buses that has an internet connection. Since I didnt have the foresight to download an episode of Battlestar Galactica, Ive got nothing better to do than read tomorrows New York Times, and to . . . . Continue Reading »