by Andrew Marantz
An update on Dinesh D'Souza's term as president of New York City's only Evangelical college.
by John Plotz
An ancient diagnosis and solution for a very contemporary problem.
interview with Edward Glaeser
Cities are not only better for the environment, but they are making us smarter: "cities ... allow the
creation of new ideas. Chains of collaborative brilliance have always
been responsible for human kind’s greatest hits. We have seen this in
cities for millennia."
by Jim Holt
"So impressive is its vision of flawed human reason that the New York
Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that Kahneman and
Tversky’s work “will be remembered hundreds of years from now,” and that
it is “a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.” They are,
Brooks said, “like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.”"
by Marc Parry
"Raymond Tallis likes a fight. .... His target: a rash of pseudo
brain science that purports to explain behavior as varied as believing
in God and falling in love. Tallis, a former clinical neuroscientist who
devoted years to studying stroke and epilepsy, considers such claims
trash. Neurotrash."
by Jonathan Rée
Persuasive though the rationales for atheism may be, the idea of
God is still a reminder that as clever as you are, there will always be a
lot of things you do not understand.
Stephen Green, interviewed by Renee Montagne
by Steven Pinker
"Believe it or not—and I know most people do
not—violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may
be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. The
decline of violence, to be sure, has not been steady; it has not brought
violence down to zero (to put it mildly); and it is not guaranteed
to ... but it's a persistent historical development, visible on scales
from millennia to years, from the waging of wars and perpetration of
genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals."
by Peter Berger
"[Juergen] Habermas has looked at the world and concluded that secularization theory—that is, the thesis that modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion—does not fit the facts of the matter."
by Lev Grossman
"Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all. ... Scrolls were the prestige format, used for important works only: sacred texts, legal documents, history, literature. To compile a shopping list or do their algebra, citizens of the ancient world wrote on wax-covered wooden tablets using the pointy end of a stick called a stylus. Tablets were for disposable text — the stylus also had a flat end, which you used to squash and scrape the wax flat when you were done. At some point someone had the very clever idea of stringing a few tablets together in a bundle. Eventually the bundled tablets were replaced with leaves of parchment and thus, probably, was born the codex. But nobody realized what a good idea it was until a very interesting group of people with some very radical ideas adopted it for their own purposes. Nowadays those people are known as Christians, and they used the codex as a way of distributing the Bible."
by Carl Zimmer
"''There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong,' the astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said. 'That's perfectly all right: it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process.' If only it were that simple."
by Ted Schroeder
"the theology of WWJD: "What would Jesus do?" ... turns Jesus into a teacher of fixed moral ideas which must be imitated, i.e. a moralist not a Savior. Even with a little help from the Holy Spirit, it sounds like a religion of obedience to moral laws. This is to define Christian activity as something we do in Jesus' name. But the Gospel is the good news about what Jesus does, not what we do."
by Charles McGrath
"Not everyone prefers a God who talks like a pal or a guidance counselor. Even some of us who are nonbelievers want a God who speaketh like — well, God."
by Kathryn Schulz
On a virtual trip to the Stanford Literary Lab, Schulz discovers literary scholars mutating into computer scientists, and vice versa.... and discovering "the theology of the 21st century".
Where Did Western Civilization Go?
PRINCETON, NJ (May 18, 2011) -- The National Association of Scholars has released a detailed study on the near extinction of Western Civilization survey courses in college curricula. The report, The Vanishing West: 1964-2010, covers 125 institutions in all 50 states and looks at requirements in 1964, 1989, and 2010. The data confirm the growing indifference, and often scorn ... for the Western experience as an integral subject of study. World History courses, and courses taught through the politically correct lenses of multiculturalism, are on the rise as alternatives.
"...the first paradigm shift in the humanities since the emergence of theory and the culture wars of the preceding two decades. If the question of the ’80s and ’90s was, “What should we be reading, and how?,” the question that dogged the opening years of our new millennium was of a vastly more dismal kind: “Why bother?”"
by Russell Jacoby
"The proposition that violence derives from kith and kin overturns a core liberal belief that we assault and are assaulted by those who are strangers to us. If that were so, the solution would be at hand: Get to know the stranger. Talk with the stranger. Reach out. The cure for violence is better communication, perhaps better education. Study foreign cultures and peoples. Unfortunately, however, our brother, our neighbor, enrages us precisely because we understand him. Cain knew his brother—he "talked with Abel his brother"—and slew him afterward. We don't like this truth. We prefer to fear strangers. We like to believe that fundamental differences pit people against one another, that world hostilities are driven by antagonistic principles about how society should be constituted."
Terry Eagleton, "In praise of Marx"
"... Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. ...Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age."
Stanley Fish, "So's your old man"
" ...valuing process over substance is the essence of liberalism, a form of thought and political organization that begins with a strong sense of the intractability of disputes at the level of belief and proceeds to turn everything it can into a question of procedure: Were all voices heard? Was the decision made on neutral grounds and without taking into considerations matters of race, gender, economic status, ethnicity, etc.? (Sounds good, doesn’t it?)"
"Very few “progressive” forces... would have shown any “understanding” of hurt Christian feelings if Jesus had been mocked in a Danish newspaper. The entire force of the argument against the offensiveness of the Danish cartoons was based on the concern that Muslims were somehow less powerful than other religious believers."
Joseph Epstein, "Lower education: Sex toys and academic freedom at Northwestern"
"One of the most important things that departed from higher education with the old ideal of the university was intellectual authority. One of the first changes I noticed from my own undergraduate education when I began teaching at Northwestern—and this is certainly not true of Northwestern alone—was all the junky subject matter being taught. Courses in science fiction, in the movies, in contemporary or near contemporary writers already consigned to the third class, along with many courses that sounded more like magazine articles in quite boring magazines."
 James Miller, Examined lives: From Socrates to Nietzche
From Sarah Bakewell's review: Miller has the "superb idea" of taking Diogenes Laertius as a model, "which sees philosophy not as a set of precepts but as something one learns by following a wise man — sometimes literally following him wherever he goes, listening, and observing how he handles situations. ... to test whether such an approach can still offer us anything of value."
Daniel Bell (1919-2011)
For a retrospective of his work, see HERE, and for his obituary, see HERE.
Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All things shining: Reading the Western classics to find meaning in a secular age
From Susan Neiman's review: Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly "offer a meditation on the meaning of life, in a sharp, engaging style that will appeal to readers both within the academy and beyond it. They provide a compressed narrative of changes in Western understanding of human existence over the course of nearly three millenniums, and argue that reading great works of literature allows us to rediscover the reverence, gratitude and amazement that were available in Homeric times."
Timothy Beal, "Among the Evangelicals: Inside a fractured movement"
"[R]ecent studies by more-or-less outsiders show there is no such thing as evangelicalism. The term represents a broad range of significantly different theologies, practices, and religious movements within Christianity, and there are often tensions among and within them. Which is no revelation at all to most more-or-less insiders, who call themselves evangelicals, however qualified, and who argue as much with others who do the same as with those of us who don't."
Benedict XVI, "Light of the world" (Excerpts)
Concerning the Eucharist: "Something quite special is going on here! He is here, the One before whom we fall on our knees! Pay attention! This is not just some social ritual in which we can take part if we want to."
Concerning Christian faith as it is practiced in the West: "we are heading increasingly toward a form of Christianity based on personal decision.
Sean D. Kelly, "Navigating past nihilism"
"There is a downside to the freedom of nihilism ... Without any clear and agreed upon sense for what to be aiming at in a life, people may experience the paralyzing type of indecision depicted by T.S. Eliot in his famously vacillating character Prufrock; or they may feel, like the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, as though they are continuously waiting for something to become clear in their lives before they can get on with living them; or they may feel the kind of “stomach level sadness” that David Foster Wallace described, a sadness that drives them to distract themselves by any number of entertainments, addictions, competitions, or arbitrary goals, each of which leaves them feeling emptier than the last. ... Herman Melville seems to have articulated and hoped for ... the meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to “the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country,” these are genuine meanings."
Bernard Schweizer, "Hating God"
"When I started investigating misotheism, I wondered what might cause a rational, decent, responsible person to go on the warpath against God. My research reveals a variety of reasons, including personal tragedy, psychological trauma, social or political upheaval, and natural catastrophe. All of these specific causes of God-hatred, however, lead back to the problem of evil."
Jan-Werner Mueller: "Making Muslim Democracies"
Through reflection on the thought and action of Jacques Maritain, Mueller concludes that "...the formation of some liberalized Islam by self-consciously moderate and democratic Muslim intellectuals should not be seen as a sideshow to the hard-nosed politics of interests.... the history—including the intellectual history—of Christian Democracy provides both reasons for optimism and lessons for the future"
Wendy Plump, "A room full of yearning and regret"
"I look at my parents and at how much simpler their lives are at the ages of 75, mostly because they haven’t marred the landscape with grand-scale deceit. They have this marriage of 50-some years behind them, and it is a monument to success. A few weeks or months of illicit passion could not hold a candle to it. If you imagine yourself in such a situation, where would you fit an affair in neatly? If you were 75, which would you rather have: years of steady if occasionally strained devotion, or something that looks a little bit like the Iraqi city of Fallujah, cratered with spent artillery?"
- David Brooks, Mental Courage
- Theodore Dalrymple, Modernity's uninvited guest
- Ross Douthat, The Pope and the crowds
- ___, Condoms, Catholicism, and Casuistry
- Stanley Fish, The crisis of the humanities finally arrives
- Thomas Hibbs, On Stanley Cavell and the uncaniness of the ordinary
- Metropolitan Hilarion, The dialogue with liberal Anglicans is over
- Carlin Romano, Cosmology, Cambridge Style
- Robert Sibley, Engineers without souls
- ___, Intellectual infantilism
Princeton's Center of Theological Inquiry interview with novelist Marilynne Robinson
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the chairman of HSBC and Anglican priest, Stephen Green, proposes a
"new capitalism" that brings good business and good ethics together. He
says moral and spiritual values should take precedence over immediate
profit.
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