Post Secularism

• Red and Blue America

  America is more complex, obviously. But I think it's fair to say that there are two poles that define our politics, and every election cycle we find that we're split rather evenly between them. Call these poles Republican and Democrat or Conservative and Liberal, Reactionary and Progressive, or Red and Blue. They are ways of describing

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• The Master and His Emissary

  This is the title of Iain McGilchrist's important new book. It's subtitle is "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World". The video below summarizes very succinctly and broadly the argument he's making, but it's based on a story by Nietzsche: There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a

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• More Thoughts on “All Things Shining”

      I’ve been thinking more about All Things Shining and why I am drawn to it and why I have problems with it. I think the easiest way for me explain my thinking about the book is by reference to the diagram above.  ATS is Quadrant 1 thinking, and it’s very interesting and helpful within

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• Thoughts on ‘All Things Shining’

  I've been spending some time with Dreyfus and Kelly the last two weeks.  I like what they're up to in their book, All Things Shining, and also in their respective courses based on the themes in the book, which you can find on podcast here for Kelly's Harvard seminar or at iTunes U for Dreyfus's

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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

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• Why American Conservatives Are Not Conservative

  While difficult to define, contemporary American conservatism seems to be shaped by a certain set of core commitments. While not exhaustive, among those characteristics one could confidently list: 1. Commitment to limited government as laid out by the Founders in the Constitution; 2. Support for Free Markets; 3. Strong National defense; 4. Individual responsibility and

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• The Mythos of Redemptive Violence vs. the Christian Chiastic Mythos

  Myth provides the framework for any comprehension we have about moral truth–that's the way it was for the ancients, and that's the way it is for us. Mythos operates at a level deeper than what we call "belief systems", because belief systems are too rational, too open to comparison in a market of competing belief

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• Post Secular Thoughts II

  I've believed for some time that the religious right is fighting an enemy in secularism that is now a paper tiger. The culture war between the religious right and the secular left has more to do with the past than the future–it was a modern battle, and we are no longer moderns.  It seems to

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• Post Secular Thoughts

  [Ed. Like other posts this week, this is a repost from a piece written several years ago that I've revised somewhat for clarity and to make it fit into the flow of what I'm thinking now. There's clarifying and integrating value for me in lining these posts up one after the other in this way.

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• The Power of Myth

  As anyone who's been reading ATF for awhile knows, I'm a big proponent of the the power of mythic narratives. To live without a narrative is to live without meaning, and even nihilists have narratives. Who was a greater mythmaker with his Eternal Return and Zarathustra stories than nihilist-in-chief, Friedrich Nietzsche. The choice is not

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