I stumbled on an excellent article nominally about Daniel Dafoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe but really about the Enlightenment debates about the supernatural; how we reconcile the two ways of knowing. Crusoe at the Crossroads/On Robinson Crusoe, Lost, and why we keep returning to mysterious islands where science blurs with the supernatural. It’s at […]
Read more...Tag: Charles Taylor
Religion’s Persistence
An unusually lucid discussion of public accommodation of religion is made by Micahel Ignatieff, in Making Room for God, an article in The New York Review of Books (June 28, 2018). Ignatieff is actually reviewing three books together, in his article, but in the course of doing so he provides a smart way of thinking […]
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...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, […]
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