September 11, 2020
Puritanism, Old and New: In Conversation with Marly Youmans on her New Novel
Marly Youmans, author of several books of poetry and fiction, released her new novel, Charis in the World of Wonders, just as the country was going into pandemic lockdown. I […]
December 11, 2014
Martyr Stories, Past and Present
Some of the most popular stories in medieval Europe were tales of saints and martyrs. Many of the hagiographies were essentially martyr stories as well, seeing as most early Christians were […]
November 24, 2014
Metafascistical: On Christianity and Marxism
The gospel of radical equality: Whether it’s the community of the Faithful or the united workers of the world, Christianity or Marxism, this is a key selling-point. All […]
November 23, 2013
There are no Coincidences: Language and Apophenia
I have a peculiar mystical inkling about language, or rather about languages in the same language group or family, which is that there are no coincidences. Translingual synapses form, […]
October 19, 2013
Why I am Inherently Evil
The idea of karma—the moral effect of your actions, good or bad, following you across births—suggests that even a newborn has some inherent guilt. In this Eastern model of […]
September 24, 2013
Against Histrionics: On Deaths and Afterlives
Compare the deaths of Socrates and Christ: They mirror each other in the setup (thinker put to death for subversion of the established order), but Christ’s death is physically painful […]
August 25, 2013
The Nature of Authority
A book describing the afterlife has been on the bestseller lists for some time, a first-person account by a neurosurgeon. It’s one of those books I’ve read reviews of, but […]
December 28, 2012
The Importance of Telling a Good Story
You would think that with scientific knowledge expanding ever so exponentially, and literalist interpretations of traditional scriptures undermined east and west by it, you would see a great popular surge […]
August 21, 2012
Parricide/Regicide/Deicide: A Few Notes on The Brothers Karamazov
First, a passage from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, regarding Comedy. “The obstacles to the hero’s desire, then, form the action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them […]
August 12, 2012
What is Truth?
Let us conceive of the mind as a weave of two fibers, as we consider muscle a weave of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles. The relative composition of a muscle is genetically […]
January 26, 2012
The Widening Circle: King, Gandhi, Christ
Morality is pesky. Is our notion of right and wrong just a function of socialization? Or is there something cosmic, objective, external about it, as constant as the speed […]