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 […]

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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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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 […]

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The Materialist Epoch

The Pagan and Christian Epochs The predominant worldview in the west before Christianity was paganism, which assumed the existence of something beyond the here-and-now of matter in space and time; gods who must be honored in their prescribed ways and seasons, for orderly human life. We discussed this in The Pagan Epoch. That “something beyond” […]

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