Post Secularism

• Toward a Robust Meaning Story

  In the past week the subtext of my posts about Reaganism and the ideological capture of the Supreme Court has been the ineffectiveness of Liberals to frame a robust meaning story. This was a theme in Ezra Klein's conversation with Larry Kramer about about why Liberals lose so many political and legal battles. They get

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• The Coming Discontinuity

  At the heart of our difficulty predicting the future is our assumption of stability. It is like this today and so it will probably be like this tomorrow, too. What makes this way of thinking seductive is that it is, usually, true. And then, all at once, it’s not. —Ezra Klein What makes discontinuity discontinuous

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• J.S. Mill + Alisdair McIntyre = Charles Taylor

  The third question is, will Democrats realize that both moral traditions need each other? As usual, politics is a competition between partial truths. The moral freedom ethos, like liberalism generally, is wonderful in many respects, but liberal societies need nonliberal institutions if they are to thrive. America needs institutions built on the “you are not

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• The Grand Inquisitor and the Alt Right

  ..Essayist Gregory Hood claims that “Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. It is the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.” A major work of alt-right history concludes: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”  Matthew

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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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• Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability

  Because the politics of inevitability assures you that whatever the good things are, they’re being brought about automatically by some invisible hand, right? The market is like Mom. You know, it’s going to take care of you with that invisible hand. And you don’t have to think about what the values might be, what you

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• Genealogy Part 11: The Christian Synthesis

  I will not cease from Mental Fight,Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:Till we have built Jerusalem,In Englands green & pleasant Land. –"Jerusalem" by William Blake I want to bring into focus certain key themes that emerge in the early common era that became central for shaping the Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary of Latin

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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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• Progressive Fever Dreams

  Every reconstructive president must confront vestiges of the old regime. The slavocracy evaded Lincoln’s grasp by seceding; the Supreme Court repeatedly thwarted F.D.R. Yet they persisted. How? What each of these presidents had at their back was an independent social movement. Behind Lincoln marched the largest democratic mass movement for abolition in modern history. Alongside

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• Genealogy Part 7: The Bigger Picture

  [For Nietzsche t]he Overman or post-human animal is he who freed himself from those forms of sham religion known as Nature, Reason, Man and Morality. Only this audacious animal can peer into the abyss of the Real and find in the death of God the birth of a new species of humanity. As with Christian

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