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 […]
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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...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 […]
Read more...Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro is ruining me as a writer. He precisely balances the need for tension to drive the story line, on the one hand, with a slow reveal of plot through an unreliable narrator, on the other. It’s difficult to pull off, but he does it magnificently. The trouble is, I like it so much […]
Read more...Modern Philosophy
A review of Modern Philosophy (Penguin 1994) by Roger Scruton. This book is, as subtitled, “an introduction and survey,” but there is also an underlying thesis in Scruton’s arrangement of subjects. By “modern philosophy” he means not merely recent developments in philosophy, but an emphasis on philosophers since Descartes who are “modernists” – committed to […]
Read more...Asher Lev
A review of My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok. This book is narrated in the first person by the fictional title character, who grows up as a Hasidic Jew. The author invented this particular Hasidic community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, but we can take it as an accurate picture of Hasidic life. The […]
Read more...People of the Book
A Review of People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooke I was not familiar with the author, but I picked this book thinking it might have all the elements of a good bit of fiction. It’s a combination mystery, history, and treatise, promising to instruct on matters of medieval Jewish practice and religious custom with […]
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