I know that I’ve let things slide here at home(page), but I’ve posted a review of E.J. Dionne’s new book over at the League. Here’s the link! Posts here will continue to be intermittent until a few personal and professional bottlenecks clear.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Here’s a re-post from Christmas last year. It’s still pretty nearly what I think about the season. — Now that Thanksgiving’s over, it’s time for my annual wrestle with the Christmas spirit. I’ve struggled with it for years, often because I’m simultaneously struggling with my faith. My reasons are nothing … Continue reading
I’ve been mulling over Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion for a while now. His chapter on the 1896 elections has been especially brain-rattling: During the presidential campaign, the major parties fought, more pointedly than ever before, to control the symbols and definitions of patriotism. The Republicans, under the tutelage of the industrialist and campaign impresario … Continue reading
[Don't get it? First look here, then look here.] …But no simple court conspiracy could subdue the lion-hearted Gingrich. Treacherous Rick Tyler and his fellow traitors lay unmanned, broken and bloodied on the ground. Tweets yet oozed from Tyler’s brow, now spilling noiselessly onto the dusty ground. “Yea,” declared the political lion, “Forsooth, I stand … Continue reading
Nothing drives political news these days like the deficit. Well, except for a certain attractive ex-governor-turned-Revolutionary-War-historian from Alaska who’s touring the country in a bus. Or except for a Weiner found somewhere it ought not be. When we’re not talking about sex (directly or by proxy), though, it’s deficits and debts, all the time. So … Continue reading
I’ve been living on the East Coast for almost exactly a decade now. I’m still finding my footing in this strange place, which is why I often think about this passage from Kurt Vonnegut (From A Man Without a Country): I am one of America’s Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but … Continue reading
Michael Oakeshott, from “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” [emphasis added] “In conversation, ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubt, but by being kindled by … Continue reading
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King: “By the way, I do think that awareness is different from thinking. I am similar to most other people, I believe, in that I do not really do my most important thinking in large, intentional blocks where I sit down uninterrupted in a chair and know in advance what … Continue reading
Andrew Sullivan picks up the surprisingly-active public discussion on hell (too good not to cite almost all of it): My worry is that hell in the afterlife distracts from the hell here and now. That hell, in Christian theology, is about rejecting the unconditional love of God, because we refuse to recognize it, because we feel unworthy … Continue reading
Here’s the latest from my chapter on Dewey’s and Oakeshott’s treatments of science: When scientific inquiry forays into practical grounds, it takes on the characteristics of the practical mode of experience. In his discussion of practical life, Oakeshott argues that it projects its own standard for organizing the world of experience. It is “the totality” … Continue reading
