From time to time I’ve asked rhetorically whether there might be a link between the loss of faith and the rise of despair. For example, in a memoir I wrote: We sometimes say people “lose hope” and become despondent, perhaps to the point of despair or even suicide, but what does that phrase really mean? […]
Read more...Category: Disenchantment
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...Winter Light — Jonas Persson
If you haven’t seen Winter Light, a 1963 Ingmar Bergman film, you should. It’s available on youtube. You can invest an hour and fifteen minutes now, and have a distillation of the views that many have of Christianity today. The primary figure in the movie (“protagonist” doesn’t seem apt) is Tomas, a disaffected and disillusioned clergyman […]
Read more...Religiosity and Religion
Doctrine “Religiosity” means the traditions that we tend to put in place of genuine relationship to God. “Religion,” though, should not be as much a pejorative as it seems to be for many people today. At heart it just means collective worship of God on shared ideas of who God is. So it implies doctrines, […]
Read more...The Thirst of the Soul
Sound-bite Atheism One of the frustrating things in the ongoing theism/atheism debate is that theism and especially Christianity is built on centuries of careful methodical thought, but the new materialism is based on sound bites, and those sound bites lack the context of a coherent belief system. They’re potshots at one system of belief (usually Christianity), not a […]
Read more...“The river’s just a river”
In the musical version of Les Miserables, Eponine sings “On My Own,” a poignant expression of her disappointment that Marius does not requite her love. Imagining that he is with her, she describes the enchantment of her surroundings: In the rain the pavement shines like silver All the lights are misty in the river In the […]
Read more...Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where […]
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