Books
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Sunday Night Journal — December 5, 2010 (I started this piece last Sunday, and had to stop writing to deal with a software emergency at work. But I had already seen that I was probably not going to be able to handle the subject in a blog post. I took it up again today, and…
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Sunday Night Journal — September 19, 2010 I finished reading N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope some weeks ago, and have been wanting to write about it, but having difficulty finding the time to do so. To let it be the subject of this week’s Sunday Night Journal seemed a way out of the impasse. But…
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…I should not have done that. I just read (while web-surfing with sandwich in hand) the description of a scene from the forthcoming final Harry Potter movies, and now I know something important about the movies which one wouldn't exactly know from reading the books. It will be a very moving scene–it was moving just to read…
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From Toward a Truly Free Market: There are certain tendencies in human beings that allow us to make lawlike statements. People do tend to buy more of a product when it is cheaper, and they tend to make more of that product when it is dearer; between these two tendencies, we really can posit supply…
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In a striking coincidence, I received a review copy of this book on the same day I posted those comments about the new Distributist Review. The book is by John Médaille, the Review‘s editor, and is subtitled “A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More,” and it carries a…
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Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. —Camus From Plato to Hegel and beyond, some of the greatest philosophers declared that what you think about death, and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about everything else–and, indeed, that it provides one of…
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By the way, apropos the previous post: there was one item in the Prose folder at the old site which seems not to have had a link to it, so it was inaccessible unless you happened to stumble on it via Google or something. I think I put it out there so I could bring…
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At the time in my life when I was young and rebellious and might have been expected to like Kerouac and the other Beat writers, I had no use for them at all. I was a grungy rock-and-roll-loving hippie, yes, but my literary tastes were strictly highbrow: I liked Yeats and Eliot and Hopkins and…
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Sunday Night Journal — June 7, 2010 I keep a list of planned topics for this journal, and this has been on the list for a while—for something close to a year, in fact, as I just discovered by looking through my email. It was in June of last year that Dale Nelson sent me…
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The May issue of The New Criterion contains a typically memorable essay by Anthony Daniels comparing Swift and Johnson, specifically with respect to the deep pessimism about human affairs that they held in common. I laughed at this passage, which describes a psychological pattern with which I am very familiar: That life is a trial…
Light On Dark Water 