Christian Neoplatonism
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Genealogy Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West
Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness? I think not. For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of
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On Reading Simone Weil’s ‘Gravity and Grace’
There’s a palpable shift going on in elite institutions where it’s becoming edgy or even fashionable to take spiritual concerns seriously again. The fashionableness is important, not because fashion is in itself important, but because it creates a permission structure for people to start exploring ideas that were before beyond the pale. Twenty years ago
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America’s Religious Future
No wonder the newly ascendant American ideologies, having to fill the vacuum where religion once was, are so divisive. They are meant to be divisive. On the left, the “woke” take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends. Adherents of wokeism see themselves as challenging the
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A Reflection on the Meaning of the Incarnation
My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and [G.B.] Shaw, that life was, so to speak, already there, but not in our universe of matter. It has spent fifteen billion years or so somehow ‘inserting’ itself into matter. Shaw expressed it by saying that the
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Belief and Cash Value
I've been thinking about William James and Charles S. Peirce lately. I like Jamesian Pragmatism, because of its open-endedness, its aptness for the way we actually live and think about the world. It's somewhat simplistic to say that for James 'truth' is what works, but it points us in the right direction. Truth is what has
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Originality vs. Novelty
[George] Steiner’s mot , that ‘originality is antithetical to novelty’ … puts its finger on a huge problem for the willed, self-conscious nature of modernist art, and art since modernism. For there is no polarity between the tradition and originality. In fact originality as an artist (as opposed to as a celebrity or a showman)
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McGilchrist’s Reading of Nietzsche’s Misreading of Plato’s Misremembering of Socrates
This separation of the absolute and eternal, which can be known by logos (reason), from the purely phenomenological, which is now seen as inferior, leaves an indelible stamp on the history of Western philosophy for the subsequent two thousand years. The reliance on reason downgrades not just the testimony of the senses, but all our