Ideas

• Artists, Saints, Prophets, and Philosophers

  This election of Donald Trump was driven by irrational factors, and overt racism is too simplistic a way to characterize them. The problem is broader in that it embraces fundamental issues of identity and acculturation in Red and Blue America. So it's important to understand what's going on rather than moralistically to dismiss his election as driven mainly

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• History & Meaning

  Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?–Blaise Pascal  The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs.

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• Mythos and Logos 3

  In “The Battle for God,” Karen Armstrong illuminates a slightly different, though related, difference, contrasting the modalities of mythos and logos. As Armstrong explains, logos is concerned with the practical understanding of how things work in the world, while mythos is concerned with ultimate meaning. Either modality can be used by liberals and conservatives alike in their everyday lives. But macro-historically, there’s

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• Awakening to Adulthood

  Not much time lately to think or write–or read. But I was struck by A.O. Scott's piece in yesterday's NYT Magazine entitled "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture", and by Andrew O'Hehir's  thoughts about it today in Salon. There is much in both pieces, but these paragraphs in O'Hehir's piece gets to the nub:

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• Honor as a Destructive Recognition Fantasy

  The word 'honor' 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

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• Basic Premises

  I wrote out these premises or base points for my thinking in response to Jonathan on a previous thread, but I thought I'd lay them out here, and let whoever wants to take shots at them. They are all debatable, needless to say, but it's how they all work together that underlies most of my

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• Belief and Cash Value

  I've been thinking about William James and Charles S. Peirce lately, and I want to do something in the future that compares their epistemology to the one developed in Barfield's Saving the Appearances. [That's a heavy lift, and we'll see if I have the energy for it during the summer] I like Jamesian Pragmatism, because

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• Irony and Decadence

  From a piece worth reading in its entirety in Salon article today: Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of

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• Burke v. Paine = Right v. Left?

  In a review of Yuval Levn's book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, Burke biographer Jesse Norman writes: But one might wonder if these categories can really be mapped onto the left and right of American politics today. After all, it was Ronald Reagan, icon of American

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• Deconstructing God

  I was amused this morning to read this interview in the NYT Stone in which the stolid Gary Guting tries to pin down the slithery John Caputo regarding Derrida's religionless religion. The Deconstructionist project is simply one of radical hermeneutic openness that is suspicious of any limiting interpretation, and so that's the game Caputo plays

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