Religion
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I don't know much about Sam Harris, one of the belligerent "new atheists" ("What is new about them?", I always want to ask). But simply from having come across bits of his writing here and there on the web I have the impression that he's a very angry man. So it was only a little…
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One of Chesterton's more well-known aphorisms holds that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. It is in that spirit that I generally approach a book review. I really don't enjoy doing them, because I feel obliged to do it in such a way as to give the prospective a reader…
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The phrase, as you probably know, is the sentence Voltaire passed on the Catholic Church: crush the infamous thing. The Atlantic has been redesigned again, made thinner and flashier, with shorter pieces reduced even further. At the top of one of the pages devoted to these, there's a box labelled "A Very Short Book Excerpt." The…
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Here's a strange, amazing, and sad story of a Russian Old Believer family who fled from the Communists into not just any old wilderness but Siberia. And survived. Read about it at the Smithsonian's web site. I don't have a post category into which this fits very well. You can read about the Old Believers here.
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Weekend Music If you thought last week's Rev. Gary Davis track was the real stuff, you may like this even better, (although it never actually gets to the crucifixion). It's seven and a half minutes long, so wait till you have a bit of time. I'm done with dyin' and I ain't gon' die no mo'…
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I've read two of Wendell Berry's novels, The Memory of Old Jack and Hannah Coulter, and consider the first one very good and the second very very good, maybe to be ranked with the best novels of our time. I've read a fair number of his essays on cultural and political topics and think very highly…
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The title of this piece caught my eye the other day when it appeared on Google News: "The Blessings of Atheism." I wondered what those might be, so I read it. It's by Susan Jacoby, one of those activist atheists. And the purported blessings she offers are pretty thin stuff. I certainly sympathize with her…
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American football, I mean. Really, it is. And in the New York Times. You don't have to know anything about football, just that Tim Tebow plays quarterback, which is the single most important position on a football team, that he was one of the top players in the country when he was in college but hasn't…
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A Litany of Election Complaints I have to do this, but when I'm done I plan to abstain from talking about politics at least until the turn of the year. I'm also going to limit, if I can, the amount of time I spend reading political news and commentary. And if I can't limit it,…
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Election Eve Thoughts: Which Is To Be Master? "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all." I really didn't want to write about politics again, but with election hysteria at its height I'm having difficulty putting…
Light On Dark Water 