Coincidentia Oppositorum

• Of Foxes and Hedgehogs

  A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing. Archilochus I’ve been arguing for years, but especially since the Cathedral Lectures, that for all our celebration of diversity, we need to find something that unites us, something that all people of good will can agree is of central importance in our being

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• Naive Idealism

  During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever

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• Cixin Liu: Democracy and Culture

  In a 2018 New Yorker profile of the Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu, Jiayang Fan writes– I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, “If you were to loosen up the country [China] a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” I remembered a moment near the end of the trilogy, when

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• What the Right & Left Get Right but Why Both Are Mostly Wrong

  [I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable

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• The Difference between Faith and Idolatry

  This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person.

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• Fear of the Future

  The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons. For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles. For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence

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• Nunes/Bannon Mind Rebuttal, Part 2

  For the most part, however, the changes that occurred at around this period [the Renaissance] do suggest the salience of primarily the right hemisphere’s world. One of the defining features of the Renaissance must be its opening of the eyes to experience, initially almost exclusively personal experience, in preference to what is ‘known’ to be

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