This is a review of This Life/Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by Martin Hagglund. Two stars for a reasonably well stated vision of reality in the introduction. I can’t recommend the book otherwise. It is repetitive; it rests on counterintuitive definitions for words and phrases, except when definitions are entirely absent; and it doesn’t fulfill […]
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Escalante’s Nightmare
A review of Escalante’s Dream, by David Roberts. I was really looking forward to reading this book. It was talked up in a big way in the literary press and it’s about a Spanish mission to Pueblo Indians in 1776 in the four corners area of the Southwest, a subject I am very interested in. […]
Read more...Unnameable Present
The Unnamable Present, by Roberto Calasso, is curious and compelling. The first half is about the features which render the post-millenial age “unnameable.” In it, Calasso connects otherwise disparate strands of thought, in very interesting ways. The presentation of these series of connections together characterize the unnameable present. In the second half, Calasso presents […]
Read more...The Judge
Here are a few themes of Blood Meridian, subtitled The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy. The character Holden, called “the judge” is Mephistophelean, and at the end is revealed as the devil himself. His chief attribute is that he is the accuser, as with the preacher at the beginning, the expriest Tobin […]
Read more...More Than Machines
I recommend The New Story of Science by Robert Augros and George Stanciu. It was first published in 1984, and that makes it prescient, given the more recent debates between theism and atheism. The central premise is that there is an Old Story of science, and a New Story. The Old Story is tied […]
Read more...The Back Row
I read a bunch of reviews of Chris Arnade’s recent book Dignity before picking it up myself and they often remark upon the objective and nonjudgmental approach Arnade takes. He’s purposely encountering people we might think of as down and out, to try to understand them. One of his conclusions is that a major […]
Read more...Christ the Tiger
I picked up this book because I had just read Howard’s Chance or the Dance, and was much impressed. In case you missed it, here is an excerpt from a comment to that post: “This person [Thomas Howard] was a Muggeridge level word smith. When he spoke his words had texture and solidness. It was something I never experienced before. […]
Read more...Chance or the Dance
I found Thomas Howard’s book Chance or the Dance because I’d read Eugene Warren’s poem Christographia XIV. Warren used the phrase Chance or the Dance and I thought it would be a good title for a book I’ve written and am just beginning to market, examining evidence (existence, intuition, yearning, significance, and so on) according to […]
Read more...But A Vapor
I recently attended a memorial service for the son of family friends. There must have been 500 people there. The family’s community centers on their church, and many braved the rain and cold to get there on a Saturday morning whether they knew the son or not. It put me in an Ecclesiastes frame of mind, […]
Read more...Like Lightning
I finished Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life/An Antidote to Chaos. I’m not big on self-help books, normally, but I like listening to Peterson’s debates and interviews, and I especially liked the series he did on old testament stories. I actually downloaded the transcripts of those and pored over them. Very insightful. In fact, I […]
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