Subversive Christianity
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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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As California Goes . . .
So goes the nation. Not always a good thing, but it would be now: In the past month, California has been the stage for a series of celebrations of unlikely legislative success — a parade of bill signings that offered a contrast between the shutdown in Washington and an acrimony-free California Legislature that enacted laws
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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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Peter Buffet, Reza Aslan, Mark Leibovich, etc.
What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there. There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for
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The Puritan Mind
Several years ago I did a series of posts on the Puritan Mind trying to understand both its dark and light sides. The positive side I called Whiggery. Whiggery, I argued, was the spirit of the abolitionist movement and the settlement house movement, but also the Yankee spirit of innovation and love of money, growth, expansion. The
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Quote of the Day: T.M. Luhrmann
In this morning's NYT: The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups
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It’s the Nineties Again
Obama's bad week is hardly worth commenting on except to point out that the only criticism of the administration that gets any traction in the corporate media is the criticism from the Right. The Ben Ghazi thing is all smoke, the IRS thing is about an overwhelmed bureaucracy, and the subpoenaing of the AP phone
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Cultural Hegemony
There was a time way back when–in the seventies–when I made an attempt to grapple with the kind of neo-Marxist thought for which the Frankfurt School was typical. I didn't get far, because while parts of it interested me, particularly its critique, it didn't deliver enough value for me to justify the time and effort
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Pope Francis and the Church of the Poor
Pope Francis knew what poverty and oppression looked like: several times a year he celebrated mass in Buenos Aires’s 21-24 slum. Yet, as leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, he denounced liberation theology, and insisted that the priests seeking to defend and mobilise the poor remove themselves from the slums, shutting down their political activity.
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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