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faith in honest doubt
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I blog on whatever angries up the blood or otherwise inspires commentary -- often politics and religion, but also culture, music, books, poetry, science, beauty, truth, these internets, and the most dangerous topic of all .... man.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'books'
Woodcuts by Bold
These were illustrations in books from the 1920s.(via A Journey Round My Skull)...
A Very Nietzschean Christmas
This cartoon from Big Fat Whale has something for all us war-on-Christmas foot soldiers* -- I particularly like the Richard Dawkins snow man, the wreath design, and the Nietzsche sweater, though I think Nietzsche was an agonized sort of atheist rathe...
A Good Constitution is Hard to Find
Cecil Bothwell isn't just a name you'd expect for a character in a Flannery O'Connor story, it's the name of a man recently elected councilman in Asheville, North Carolina. Bothwell does not believe in god, and the rest writes itself almost as plainl...
Father Mapple\'s Sermon
As delivered by Orson Welles as Mapple: As delivered by Gregory Peck as Mapple: As written by Herman Melville, chapter 9 of Moby Dick: Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. "Star boa...
A Public Service Announcement for The Road: Never Trust a Trailer
For those still hemming and hawing over whether to watch The Road, and specifically for those who are loath to see another film adaptation crap all over its source material, please know that this trailer (embedding disabled) gives a very misleading i...
A Thought on The Road and Fire
Having finally kicked myself sharply enough to find a way to watch the film adaptation of The Road (thanks, LN, for the spur), I have but a single thought on which I may or may not later expand depending on further reflection and my ever-swerving moo...
Films of the 00s
Gareth Higgins of The Film Talk blog offers his top 10 films of the 00s, which stretches to considerably more than ten items. While I have no quarrel with expanding a top ten list to numbers larger than ten, I shall nonetheless focus on the disagreem...
Reading to Architecture
I am almost completely at a loss when it comes to geeking out about architecture, but I can spot an interesting structure when I see one, and spotting one is easier when, as in the case of the Seattle Central Library, it has been the subject of so mu...
Origin at 150
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published 150 years ago today. It revolutionized the science of biology, and arguably altered the way humankind has thought of itself ever since. And everyone lived happily ever after. Yes?...
Failed Cultural Escape Hatches
In the November 2009 Harpers, Mark Kingwell winds down a review of The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects as follows:Nor will consideration of our own place in the consumer economy necessarily lead to changes in what we ...
Mad Men - A Third Season Ends
I am still reeling from the season three finale of Mad Men; rarely has a mere tee-vee show so wantonly toyed with my emotions by cutting so close to life. Here's Heather Havrilesky, and I warn my three readers that there will be spoilers aplenty from...
Carl Sagan Day
I don't quite know what it means, but I like it since it favorably concerns one of my very first man-crushes, Carl Sagan: Carl Sagan Day is tomorrow! I assume there will be lots of science-y stuff going on. Holy crap, I was right! I would ask that Ca...
Thomas Aquinas: No Shoulder-Shrugger
Karen Armstrong said the following in an interview with NPR's Terry Gross:Thomas Aquinas in his great work the "Summa Theologica," he says yes, now here are some proofs to show that something brought something into existence when there could have bee...
Crazy for God
With recent polling showing that more than a third of New Jersey conservatives consider Barack Obama to be either certainly or maybe the anti-Christ, it is high time to listen to former fundamentalist Christian Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for Go...
Poem of the Day: "When Forty Winters ..."
As if to defy the reality of my ever-narrowing tilt down the slide of another multiple-of-ten birthday, I hereby present one of Shakespeare's meditations on aging: William Shakespeare, Sonnet #2.When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,And dig deep ...
How Did This Get In? Ecclesiastes 9
That the book of Ecclesiastes stands up rather well as a piece of ancient wisdom is, in itself, unsurprising; that such a book should have passed into the Christian canon is something of a mystery. This passage from chapter 9, for example, strikes me...
Features and Bugs
James Wood has written a very "on the one hand, on the other hand" review of Terry Eagleton's recent mud-toss in the general direction of "new atheism" (previously touched on here, here, here, here, and here), and while on the first hand -- the hand ...
Karen Armstrong's Just-So Story
On Karen Armstrong's own account, Western civilization began disappointing her in the 1500s: During the 16th and 17th centuries Western people began to develop a new kind of civilisation, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on t...
Sunday Unhelpful Elisions Blogging: Religion and Morality
It's bad enough that religious believers routinely equate god-belief with morality, a confusion that goes back at least as far as the Decalogue, which elevates brand loyalty to Jehovah to the first rank of moral demands. It's arguably worse when non-...
