Am. History & Culture
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Supernatualism vs. Naturalism IV
Very interesting Salon interview with John Haught. Very good questions and good answers I, for the most part, agree with. An excerpt: What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality? The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without
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Moderate Complacency
The biggest obstacle that prevents decent, moderate Americans from seeing how their country is morphing into unAmerica lies in that the most negative developments do not directly affect them or their families and friends. This is certainly true about the war, and that’s the main difference between this fiasco and the one in Vietnam. The
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Disembedding and Theosis
And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head. Luke 9:58 I've recently seen two films–"Into the Wild" and "Beowulf"–that both in their different ways are stories of human folly and human heroism, but each in
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Quote of the Day: Harry Frankfurt
Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality. So they are intended, in a very real way, to make us crazy. To the extent that we believe them, our minds are occupied and governed by fictions, fantasies, and illusions that have been concocted for us by the liar. What we accept as real is
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Human Flourishing
Taylor makes an important distinction between what he calls older religions and the "higher" or post-Axial Religions. This term comes from what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, that period in the first millennium BCE when various higher forms of religion appeared seemingly independently in different civilizations, marked by such figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates,
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The Weather Gods in a Disenchanted Cosmos (expanded)
I’d like to say that I find [Georgia] Governor Perdue’s emphasis on prayer to address droughts baffling. But I don’t. I understand it completely. Growing up Southern Baptist, I regularly prayed until about midway through college when I turned into a freedom-hating Bolshevik surrender monkey. But even if I understand where he’s coming from, it’s
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Slow Institutional Degradation
"Process" is now considered a bad word by political consultants. After writing Worse than Watergate in 2004, which was about the secrecy of the Bush administration, I learned that the Kerry campaign did not use the subject of secrecy because they thought it was a "process" issue. It seemed almost standard policy of Democrats to
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Zombie Traditionalism
Ed: I'm reposting this piece from 2005 which newer readers may not have ever read because of its congruence with the last post about The Zeitgeist of Unbelief: To me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In the former people live
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The Zeitgeist of Unbelief (Updated)
From Taylor’s A Secular Age: We saw how for Providential Deism the principal claim to God’s benevolence is precisely the nature of his unchanging order in creation. . . For those who take this view, the noblest, highest truth must have this general form. Personal interventions, even those of a God, would introduce something arbitrary,
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Getting after the Future
I’ve been reading in philosopher of religion Charles Taylor’s new book, A Secular Age, which explores the monumental cultural shift over the last 500 years from having the "social imaginary" of premoderns to that of moderns. By social imaginary he means a culture’s collective representation of reality. The medieval peasant in France has more in