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Category Archives: Religion

“Fundamentalism is Rationalism in Religion.”

22-Sep-11

buy Lurasidone I still find Sullivan good on most topics beside religion, but his defense of religion as transcending tenet is worth a look.  It contains the nugget “fundamentalism is rationalism in religion.”  Moralism and rationalism don’t wash too well with a God conceived of as a union of is and is not. The transcendent God tends […]

Bertrand Russell’s Atheist Essays.

14-Sep-11

http://kyleschen.com/tag/huntermadeit/ There is a fine little collection of essays about atheism by Bertrand Russell, entitled Why I Am Not A Christian, which I read on subway rides about the city the past week.  It is light reading, and his mature essays are in a lucid style which offers no difficulties (some of his earlier essays, such […]

Simone Weil and Homer and Force and Love and Blake.

11-Sep-11

Scott Moringiello recalls Simone Weil on Homer and violence: “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force, that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” “Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” […]

Nicholas of Cusa, Theology, and Reason.

02-Sep-11

There’s a neat little article by Mark Goldblatt on reason’s relationship to the concept of infinity, and hence, to God; it is unfortunately given the idiot title “theology is dead” (the title is probably not the writer’s fault).  As with most modern writing, the best part is when he borrows the thoughts of a much […]

Mysticism and Moralism.

20-Aug-11

From the Coleman Barks interpretation of Rumi: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense. Reading a lot of Rumi recently. […]

On Adam and Eve.

15-Aug-11

Andrew Sullivan engages with the Adam and Eve question – whether they existed – after an NPR story on a few thoughtful evangelicals doing what thoughtful evangelicals in the end must do: repudiate Biblical literalism, and make a place in the pews for some simpler mind. All this is terribly obvious, and I was raised […]

Our Lady of Loreto in Brooklyn.

13-Aug-11

Having some friends in the Prospect Heights area of Brooklyn, I have driven Atlantic Avenue fairly often, the road which connects that part of Brooklyn with Richmond Hill in Queens.  One day there was some work being done on the road, and I was detoured onto the streets of East New York, where I drove […]

More Depressing Church News.

21-Jul-11

A recent report on sexual abuse in Ireland has concluded that the hierarchy’s practices regarding sexual abuse have not changed much, with the hierarchy covering up cases two-thirds of the time, in cases from 1996 to 2007, even after new guidelines had been released.  The Vatican in particular came up for rebuke, as it apparently […]

Thomas Merton’s Raids on the Unspeakable.

04-Jul-11

When I tried to read Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain while in college – a book compared (by the publishing trade) with Augustine’s Confessions – I was astounded to find the book self-promoting, egotistical, petty, and posturing, without a single elevated thought or even sentence that could place it with the Confessions.  This is one […]

Stabilitas Loci.

08-Jun-11

This week marks three complete years in the woods; I moved up to the cabin full-time just as the private school year was coming to a close in 2008.  Since that time I have spent ten seasons here; and a season apiece in the two most interesting cities in America, a winter in New Orleans […]