Ideas
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Quote of the Day: Cormac McCarthy
Black: “What would you do if Jesus was to speak to you?” White: “Do you imagine that he might?” Black: “No, I don’t. But, but, I’own know.” White: “I’m not virtuous enough.” Black: “No, professor, it ain’t nothing like that. You ain’t got to be virtuous. You just got to be quiet.” Source: From his
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The Sacred Polity
"Was anybody else offended by…can you put your hand on your heart?" Beck said. "It's the national anthem!" He said he had shushed his son and told him to put his hand on his heart when Christina Aguilera was singing the song. "I was really offended by the sports players that were just hanging on
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Word of the Day: ‘Endo-colonialism’
. . . Virilio suggests that political economy cannot be subsumed under the political economy of wealth, with a comprehension of the management of the economy of the state being its general aim. Indeed, for him, the histories of socio-political institutions such as the military and artistic movements like Futurism show that war and the
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“Inception”, “Solaris”, and the Unconscious
In the past week I've watched both Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Christopher Nolan's Inception. Both in very different ways try to grapple with the question: What is the human unconscious? First, a little riff on that question, and then maybe I'll get around to the movies. We all heard when we were children that that the human brain
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The Battle for the Commonplace Center
When democratic political leaders go to college they tend to study things like political science, economics, law, and public policy. These fields tend to use a scientifically false theory of human reason — Enlightenment reason. It posits that reason is conscious, that it can fit the world directly, that it is logical (in the sense
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Why Decency Isn’t Enough
Americans have to be shrewd, too. And if they put the GOP back in the majority today, they clearly lack shrewdness. I understand the country's frustration with the feckless, corporate-owned Democrats, and I understand that the economy is bad. So has it come to just flailing at whoever's in office? Is that how mindlessly lost
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The Judaeo-Christian Cosmogonic Myth
I think that one of the biggest problems with the contemporary West lies in its inability to feel the sacred. And this lack of feeling makes it almost impossible to frame a plausible cosmology open to transcendence. We look at the starry sky above us and we feel something that science simply is inadequate to