The Human Condition

Zizek, McCain, Trump, and Big Daddy

I'm no expert on Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian psychotherapist and edgy philosopher from Slovenia, but I find his distinction between the Oedipal Father Figure and the Primal Father Figure an interesting frame through which to observe the events surrounding the death of John McCain in the last week. Elites in the American media and political
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Cultures of Corruption

In a culture of corruption, like the ones that infected companies like Enron and continue to infect much of Wall Street and the political class in places like Washington, D.C., nobody really believes corruption is wrong. It's accepted simply as how things work, and so if you work in places like that, and you haven't
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It’s the Meaninglessness, Stupid

I've just finished Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging after just having read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both focus on what I've been writing about here for years, which is that the problem at the root of American societal dysfunction since the sixties is the lack of a meaning narrative that gives Americans a
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Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso

I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any
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C.S. Peirce on Believing 1

If the settlement of opinion is the sole object of inquiry, and if belief is of the nature of a habit, why should we not attain the desired end, by taking any answer to a question which we may fancy, and constantly reiterating it to ourselves, dwelling on all which may conduce to that belief,
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More on the Torture Report

If our leaders were more honest, they’d admit that the CIA’s recently revealed torture isn’t a break from this legacy, but the fruit of it – the product of decades of dehumanizing counter-insurgency warfare that expanded the USA from 13 colonies on the East Coast to much of North America and, ultimately, a global empire
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Ross Douthat v. Pope Francis

Douthat argues in a recent piece that the Pope and church synod's can't just change doctrine. It can't, for instance, just say that Christological ideas that are virtually Arian can be tolerated. And then he says: Now you can make a case that my hypothetical is absurd or fails as an analogy because the proposed changes to
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Grace in the Wilderness

If you want optimism, I don't have any for our society's near future. But hope I have, and here's a repost of an essay that explains my reason for it: Barfield and Nietzsche start from the same place—a recognition that the transcendent values of the West have dried up as a living source of meaning in
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The Great Transformation

Several months ago I announced that I was going to post a piece entitled "1848". It's probably not going to happen, but my reason for it was that I saw it as the year that the music died, so to say, the year that materialism and disenchantment became the dominant motif in the West. When
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Gyges’ Ring

This American Life did a show some time ago about superpowers, and in Act One John Hodgeman asks which superpower, if only one were possible, would we choose–Invisibility or Flight. The answers given by people he interviewed were, I thought, rather depressing. One person talked about how she would choose Invisibility so that she could steal sweaters from
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