Making Sense of Religion
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The Praying Coach of Bremerton
Teachers are state employees, but they are not the state’s robots. When they clearly speak on their own, the First Amendment should apply. Whether they kneel in prayer or protest, it’s not just acceptable for students and parents to see teachers as people and citizens; it’s imperative. The best way to teach pluralism is to
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Imagining a Positive Human Future
The anti-liberals Rose profiles all believed that liberalism prescribed a life without sacrifice, an age when individual contentment reigned supreme and collective struggle disappeared. This was not true then, and it is not true now. What they missed is what liberalism actually believes: that there is a collective identity to be found in collective betterment,
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Genealogy Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation
I wanted to stress in Parts 8 and 9 of this series that philosophy for the ancients, and theology for the early Christians, while it was an exercise in theoria, which in Greek means nous-awakened contemplative seeing, it was not 'theoretical' in our modern sense. It was first a praxis whose objectives were to transform the
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Genealogy Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism
The Greek tradition had been one of tolerance of others’ beliefs, an inclusive attitude to the gods, and one could see Constantine’s Edict as lying in that tradition. But by the end of the fourth century, such tolerance was a thing of the past, as the dispute between Symmachus and Ambrose over the Altar of
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Genealogy Part 8: Plato–Habitus as Heuristic
Whether the goal was to convert, to console, to cure, or to exhort the audience, the point was always and above all not to communicate to them some ready-made knowledge but to form them. In other words, the goal was to learn a type of know-how; to develop a habitus, or new capacity to judge
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Genealogy Part 6: Vervaeke’s “Awakening” Series v. My “Genealogy” Series
Plato lived at a time when the inner crisis of the traditional Greek polis and the religion intimately bound up with it had become evident, and there seems to be no reason to deny that this had a profound effect on his decision to abandon the public arena to cultivate the wisdom necessary to build
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Genealogy Part 5: Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles
I don't see myself as doing anything particularly original, but I do see myself as part of a larger effort to get things rebalanced. When I talk about the "Living Real", that's real for me, but I am no prodigy in the scope of my experience of it. It's real enough for me that it