Rene Girard – Albert Norton, author

Power Struggle

AlbertAugust 27, 2019August 27, 2019

I sit up and pay attention when Roger Scruton speaks. He recently considered the significance of the worldview evinced in books by Uval Noah Harari, who is a biological determinist in the same vein as Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Harari acknowledges the philosophical consequences of the humanist rejection of transcendent truth. He goes a step […]

Outrage

AlbertMarch 1, 2019March 1, 2019

I would like to introduce you to Rene Girard, if you’re not already familiar with his work, but first this. Micah Mattix, in his excellent Prufrock daily blog, quotes a W.H. Auden note to a publisher who refused Ezra Pound’s poetry because he (Pound) was a fascist. Auden wrote: “[B]egin by banning his poems not […]

Mimetic Desire

AlbertJanuary 28, 2019February 1, 2019

Interesting (to me) quote from an 1853 book by John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, […]

Metaphysical Vibration

AlbertJanuary 27, 2019January 27, 2019

I’ve often said that modern culture is essentially materialistic, in the philosophical sense that material (physical) things are deemed to be all there is. And yet, materialists routinely invoke language of the transcendental to explain what’s going on around them, including the word “transcendent” itself. It’s confusing. It has the effect of masking the absence of […]

But A Vapor

AlbertJanuary 19, 2019January 20, 2019

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, […]

Like Lightning

AlbertJanuary 19, 2019January 19, 2019

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 […]