A review of The Chosen, by Chaim Potok I’ve long been a reader of literary fiction, and had it in mind that I would be a natural as a writer because of it. I was wrong. You learn a lot by reading, obviously, and it’s certainly true that writing will come easier if your reading […]
Read more...Author: Albert
The Science of God
Review of The Science of God, the Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom, by Gerald Schroeder Gerald Schroeder was a physicist who studied the God of the Bible and science side-by-side, to try to make sense of the whole of reality. I appreciate that he doesn’t try to ignore physical evidence that science provides, about […]
Read more...Strong Gods
Disenchantment In Milan Kundera, I introduced his concept of subjective “lightness of Being,” citing his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I read that book probably 35 years ago, but it sprang to mind instantly upon reading an article by R.R. Reno. He is the editor-in-chief of First Things magazine, and his article published there […]
Read more...Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It resonated with me when I read it in the 80’s, but then I put it aside for lo these many years. Recently I read an important article by R.R. Reno which brought it back to mind. I’ll tell you why in Strong Gods, but first let’s […]
Read more...Dolts and DNA
Review of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford. I picked up this book because it was reviewed in the Review section of the Wall Street Journal, to which I repair religiously on Saturdays. I had in mind to get current on the state of DNA research, after hearing so much hoopla […]
Read more...Pagan Christmas
A sincere believing relative bemoaned the crass commercialization of Christmas. My reaction: “It’s worse than you think.” I mean it cheerfully, actually. I’ll try to explain. People do the whole Christmas thing regardless of their beliefs because it’s fun. There’s nothing inherently evil in it, and there’s some good. So I don’t think there’s any […]
Read more...Silence
Liam Neeson has just the right kind of face for the concerned sincerity that you would expect the devil to have. He was well-cast in this Martin Scorcese movie. Silence is about two kinds of silence: the putative silence of God about His own existence, and then that silence requited by man’s. In the early […]
Read more...Constantine Oprisan
This is a reprint of a portion of a 1996 interview of the late Orthodox priest George Calciu, who spent years of torture in the communist Romanian gulag for being a Christian priest. He was speaking of his cell-mate, Constantine Oprisan. This was also posted on Rod Dreher’s blog on December 7, 2017. I was […]
Read more...Kingship
Imagine you’re a king, riding your majestic white steed through the forest. You stop in a little village for water and are served by a humble village girl. She enchants you. You speak with her and find that you’re falling in love with her. But now you’ve got a problem. She can’t really love you in […]
Read more...Top-Soil
More Roger Scruton. Here’s an excerpt from Modern Philosophy, in which Scruton is talking of the sterile landscape left by scientistic reductionism: The meaning of the world is enshrined in conceptions that science does not endorse: conceptions like beauty, goodness and the soul which grow in the thin top-soil of human discourse. This top-soil is […]
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