Post Secularism
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Ideas Matter
[Ed. note: I'm reposting this 2005 piece as a follow up to "The Communion of Saints" post I put up over the weekend.[ My goal in what I’ve written in the "Sinning Originally" pieces is not to argue for a position; it’s rather to describe the world as it appears from within the framework I
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Thoughts on “Lost” and “The Divine Comedy”
And so if we’re at all awake, we have this sense of living now at a threshold moment, and the story being told here on Lost projects for us what the stakes are using a technique that interweaves themes from both science and religion, logos and mythos. But at the heart of our story, as…
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Bishop Tobin
Normally, I don't get into discussions about the church hierarchy because, sub specie aeternitatis, the hierarchy doesn't really matter that much. Its role is to keep the lights on and pay the bills, and to provide a minimal sense institutional continuity that humans need to function in groups over time. But whenever the people who
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Kierkegaard on the Couch
…the specific character of despair is this: it is precisely unaware of being despair. –Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all
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Futile Culture Wars
I’m with Barzun. The West is decadent. Decadence happens, and like winter it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a time that doesn’t have much exterior spiritual energy anymore–the spirit has gone underground, so to speak, into the soul’s interior. And since the whole movement of salvation history has been a movement from outer…
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Doubt & Belief
Douthat puts it nicely in a post last week: As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious
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Free to Choose
I think that at a most basic level my concern is apologetic in the sense of making orthodox (i.e., Nicene) Christianity something that can make sense in our fragmented cultural milieu. In doing so, I try to work within a framework that respects traditional affirmations, but which might make an approach to Christianity plausible for
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Metaxis
Metaxis is the Greek word used by Plato to describe the condition of in-betweenness that is a structural characteristic of the human condition–we humans are suspended on a web of polarities–the one and the many, eternity and time, freedom and fate, instinct and intellect, risk and safety, love and hate, to name but a few.
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Looking Ahead
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards intothe future. The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy. Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth. –Marshall McLuhan For a McLuhanish essay I wrote some time ago, see here. The point is that we all