Making Sense of Religion
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On Charles Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’, Part 1
Part 1: Disenchantment: Post Axial Disembedding Charles Taylor's A Secular Age seeks to answer the fundamental question: How is it that if five hundred years ago it would have been very unusual to profess yourself an atheist, today it is no longer the case, and among intellectuals it's arguably the majority position. Another way of saying it is that there were always the
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C.S. Peirce on Believing 1
If the settlement of opinion is the sole object of inquiry, and if belief is of the nature of a habit, why should we not attain the desired end, by taking any answer to a question which we may fancy, and constantly reiterating it to ourselves, dwelling on all which may conduce to that belief,
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Believing 2
Earlier this week I tried to make the case that "believing" is what we all do when we give value, meaning, and purpose to our experience and to our work in the world. Believing is fundamentally an irrational act. It draws upon resources that transcend what the brain/sense system can give us with certainty. The
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More on the Torture Report
If our leaders were more honest, they’d admit that the CIA’s recently revealed torture isn’t a break from this legacy, but the fruit of it – the product of decades of dehumanizing counter-insurgency warfare that expanded the USA from 13 colonies on the East Coast to much of North America and, ultimately, a global empire
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Corpus Christi: A Holy Week Meditation
Palm Sunday, 2014 I'm finding that I have less and less in common with most Catholics I know–particularly the ones in the management class–because they have become so Protestantized. By that I mean, to stereotype somewhat, overly literal, overly moralistic, and lacking anything that remotely resembles a sacramental sensibility. We Americans whether churched or unchurched,
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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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Francis as the Vatican’s Gorbachev? (Updated)
Oh, I forgot. John 23rd was. The Vatican since then has been trying futilely to get back to the status quo ante, but the "Vatican Security System" has been in a slo-mo implosion mode since then. Things move a little more slowly in such ancient institutions. Anyway, this paragraph struck me in an article in