Berry on the Perils of Specialization

The badness of all this is manifested first in the loss even of the pretense of intellectual or academic community. This is a loss increasingly ominous because intellectual engagement among the disciplines, across the lines of specializations – that is to say real conversation – would enlarge the context of work; it would press thought [...]

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Breaking Bad and Godfather – Vito or Michael?

I’m almost done with season four of AMC’s Breaking Bad and am becoming more and more convinced that, in many ways, Breaking Bad is essentially the story of Michael in The Godfather or Vito in The Godfather Part II told over four seasons. Very interested to see what happens in season five. What awaits Walt?

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Social Conservatism, Big Government, and Moralism

Kimberly Strassel offers the most perceptive analysis I have read so far on Rick Santorum: General elections are not won on bases alone. They are won on the margins—with the votes of married, exurban women, of independents, of moderate men. Many of these voters are generally conservative. They are also generally open to, even reassured [...]

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Sullivan on Libertarianism and Social Conservatism

Andrew Sullivan: I guess what I’m saying is that libertarianism – defined as an instinct to trust people to figure their own collective problems out by trial and error – is not incompatible with social conservatism from the top down and, more importantly, from the bottom up. In fact, if you believe that the truths of [...]

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Mary Karr’s Descending Theology: Christ Human

Another corker from Karr:  Such a short voyage for a god, and you arrived in animal form so as not to scorch us with your glory. Your mask was an infant’s head on a limp stalk, sticky eyes smeared blind, limbs rendered useless in swaddle. You came among beasts as one, came into our care [...]

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on the perils of being a young writer

Yep: I was writing by the time I left high school and I bought that writing with me to Howard. Most of it was pretty awful Black Power\Strong Black Woman\Black Love\Kill Whitey “poetry.” But the writing plugged me into Washington’s writer scene and older writers who were kind enough to tell me that I was [...]

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Peter Leithart and Simon Critchley and the Possibility of a Secular Order

From the blog of Peter Leithart: In a New Yorker interview, Simon Critchley discusses his recent The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, which raises fundamental doubts about the possibility of a secular political order: “Even if you look at things like social democratic forms of government, which would believe themselves entirely secular, they’re not. If you [...]

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Charles Taylor on Religion, Culture and Secularism

From the author of Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, Charles Taylor: You’ve written elsewhere of the “tragic and destructive consequences of hard-line secularism”. What did you mean by that? One of the difficulties with targeting religion, as some secularists do, is that as a concept it’s incredibly fluid. What do we mean by “religion”? You [...]

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Santorum’s Clumsy Words, Part 239 – Religion in the Public Square

One of the many unfortunate things about Rick Santorum being a major candidate for the Republican nomination is that the man may be the most aggressively-hostile mainstream candidate we’ve seen in years. There’s nothing presidential about the hectoring tone that characterizes all of his speeches. It’s like if you take John McCain throwing a tantrum [...]

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Wendell Berry on Technocracy

Wendell Berry from his Life is a Miracle: All of the disciplines are increasingly identifiable as professionalisms, which are increasingly conformable to the aims and standards of industrialism. All of the disciplines are failing the test of propriety because they are failing the test of locality. The professionals of the disciplines don’t care where they are. Though they [...]

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