Am. History & Culture
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More on the Puritan Mind
In the Anglo-American experience there were three bloody civil wars–the one in England led by Cromwell, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. Each was a phase in a long-term struggle of the Puritan “moderns” to defeat the Tory “premoderns.” I have come to think of the American Revolution as the Puritans' finishing a
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Left & Right Wing Puritans
Moby Dick is our national national myth. It's cognate with the story of Marduk and Tiamat. It's the story of the attempt to repress the forces of chaos with a violence that justifies itself in the righteous quest to impose law and order, but instead creates even more lawlessness and disorder. It's a myth that's
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meaningoflifetv
If you have some time for catching up with some of the best thinking on all the big questions, check out this new site with video interviews by put together by Slate’s Robert Wright. Very interesting overview. More from me on it later.
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Have an Un-zombie Christmas.
There is probably no time of the year when the zombie traditionalism of which I speak comes more into the fore of our awareness. It's a time during which what is meant to be a commemoration of a profoundly significant spiritual event has become the dog wagged by the tail of frantic shopping and holiday
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Searching for Common Ground
From Garrison Keillor's "Decoding Christmas Dinner" today in Salon: The men who gather in the living room on Christmas this year don't have the easy common language that my uncles had. In Minnesota, you have the weather for conversation, but that's only good for an hour or so. Sports is not the common ground it
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Retrieval
If there is one thing that can be said for certain about human beings it’s that they are ambivalent, conflicted, and contradictory. What they think and what they do more often than not has very little to do with one another, because human beings want to eat their cake and have it too. But often
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Modernity & the Loss of Soul
Modernity is, among other things, the story of the gradual shriveling up of that sense of the “sacred” as a given in human experience. The common name used to describe this story is secularization, but that word only scratches the surface of the significance of what has happened to us in the last five hundred
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Dying Traditions
NPR ran a story this morning about the Islenos of St. Bernard Parish in New Orleans. They are people the Spaniards brought over from the Canary Islands in pre-Napoleonic times to settle and defend this northeastern outpost of their American empire. The report was essentially an elegy to a dying traditional American subculture. It is
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Zombie Traditionalism II
For me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In a premodern culture people live for the most part in a 'given' world and in a modern culture in a chosen world–or at least in a world where choices are forced upon