Books

• Wandering in the Wilderness

  Reader DS wrote me offline asking if I had written a book or anything that might help him understand the fuller context of what I write here, and I sent him the intro to a book entitled Wandering in the Wilderness I started around 2000-01. Back then I tried half-heartedly to find a publisher, but

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• Beast + Angel = Mensch

      I hope you'll forgive my mania for diagrams lately.  I'm just practicing for stuff I have to do for work.  But a couple of years ago I put up a reflection piece on Steinbeck's East of Eden entitled "Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves." About a year before I reread The Brothers Karamazov. 

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• Garry Wills NYRB piece on ‘All Things Shining’

  I came across Garry Wills New York Review of Books review of ATS last night. He pretty much hated it. "It is written by well-regarded professors," he says "(one of them the chairman of the Harvard philosophy department). This made me rub my eyes with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and

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• More Thoughts on “All Things Shining”

      I’ve been thinking more about All Things Shining and why I am drawn to it and why I have problems with it. I think the easiest way for me explain my thinking about the book is by reference to the diagram above.  ATS is Quadrant 1 thinking, and it’s very interesting and helpful within

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• Tea Party at the Mall

  Liberal and rationalist Steve Benen asks what do these people want?  He can't figure it out, but I don't think it's that difficult.  They want the United States to be what it was before the Civil War.  I don't think it's primarily driven by racism; racism is a part of it because that's the way

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• 2012 or Apocalypse Now (really)

  The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf      Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind      Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.     Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.      The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,      Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends   

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• Honor

  The word has mostly positive connotations for us–it's a good thing to be a man of honor, or to give one's word of honor.  But I've always thought there was something fishy about honor and the honor culture from which it originates–it seemed to be too concerned with reputation and public perception rather than with

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