Ideas

• Subjects and Objects

  It has often been pointed out that Westerners differ from other cultures in their  sense of separation from the world around them–we are subjects over here and there are objects over there–but I don't think this is primarily a Western/non-Western difference, but a Modern/premodern difference. It's Western to the degree that Modernity is something given

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• Cosmogenesis I

  I mentioned the other day that I was reading Wink's The Powers that Be in which he talks about the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which he traces back to the  primal, viciously violent battle between Marduk and Tiamat in the Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian cosmogonic myth. And at some point I want to come back

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• Does Christianity Have a Future?

  We are all postmoderns now, and that means anything goes. The premodern, traditionalist narrative remains only a ghostly presence, and the modern Enlightenment Rationalist narrative persists merely as an old habit that we maintain for want of anything better. In such a cultural gray zone, people have shown themselves capable of believing in almost anything,

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• Zombie Traditionalism III

  What we all want is life. And this discussion about living vs. zombie traditionalism is really a discussion about how culture helps us to live or gets in the way of our living well.  A vibrant culture is one in which people are alive–deeply, richly alive. Not just physically healthy, but alive in the soul,

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• Thin Ice.

  The best kind of conservative understands how fragile civilization is, that we're all walking through history on a thin sheet of ice which separates us from the barbarism that lies beneath. Occasionally a society breaks through the ice. We saw it in Germany in the thirties and the Balkans in the nineties. We saw it

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