Making Sense of Religion
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Quote of the Day: Leon Wieseltier
The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is not a scientific question. Science confers no special authority, it confers no authority at all, for the attempt to answer a nonscientific question. It is not for science to say whether science belongs in morality and politics and art.
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Mud (again)
[I posted this thought piece on the film Mud in June when it was in the theaters, but since the movie is out in DVD now, I thought I'd post it again. It might help those of you puzzled about what that post about Mandela and Che was all about–this angel/imp, Huck/Tom polarity is for
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Francis Spufford on Lennon’s ‘Imagine’
Or for a piece of famous fluffiness that doesn’t just pretend about what real lives can be like, but moves on into one of the world’s least convincing pretenses about what people themselves are like, consider the teased and coiffed nylon monument that is “Imagine”: surely the My Little Pony of philosophical statements. John and
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Francis’s Church
Timothy Egan in this morning's Times: The Jesuits have always tried to get people to think for themselves, to arrive at belief through an arduous process. When bishops started telling parishioners that their gay and lesbian siblings were sinners, and that family planning was a grievous wrong, people stopped listening to them — for good
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Liberal Christianity
Two pieces popped up today. One, "A Religious Legacy with a Leftward Tilt" in the NYT today, which talks about recent scholarship that is trying to show how liberal Protestant Christianity has shaped the mainstream American ethos. Key grafs: In “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History,” published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr.
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Being in the Grip of Compulsions We Don’t Understand
I have been getting this feeling lately about the big historical sweep of things and of our individual seemingly insignificant part to play in it. It’s a feeling of how mostly things don’t change, and yet how they do, how greed and powerlust seem to be in the driver’s seat, and yet that they are
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Fear & Desire; Grace & Freedom
These high-minded questions conceal a frightening Olympian agenda. Harris is really a social engineer, with a thirst for power that sits uneasily alongside his allegedly disinterested pursuit of moral truth. We must use science, he says, to figure out why people do silly and harmful things in the name of morality, what kinds of things
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Fear and Desire; Grace and Freedom
Last week I quoted Jackson Lear's Nation article about how new atheists like Sam Harris aren't just reductionist in their rejection of religion, but their embrace of an aggressive ideological positivism can be just as dangerous as any fanaticism that comes from the right. Right-wing ideologues are more in the news these days, but I