March 25, 2019
On A TALE OF FOUR DERVISHES by Mir Amman
Amman, Mir. A Tale of Four Dervishes. Translated from the Urdu with an Introduction by Mohammed Zakir. Penguin Classics (India), 1994. 158 pages. Continuing my exploration of Penguin India’s […]
October 8, 2016
Order and Stability
I can’t help but notice the word “instability” getting used, in political writing, to refer to widespread and continued lawlessness, violence, rioting, and so on. A “stable” society is one […]
November 4, 2015
The Principle of Inversion
If you look from a distance at our media talking about traditional religions, you find that “Hinduism” is reduced to the caste system and Hindu nationalism, “Islam” to fundamentalist or […]
October 29, 2015
Hard and Brittle Religions
Why do some religions die out, while others persist in the face of brutal persecution? Religious diversity, while not completely analogous to biological diversity, has drastically diminished over the […]
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 […]
December 11, 2013
Believe What You Wish
The Buddha’s hard-to-disagree-with central insight—that desire is at the source of human suffering, and human action in general—has ready examples in our loves, lusts, and ambitions; it seems to have […]
November 17, 2013
Me and the Monotheists
I have noticed, over the past decade of writing and publishing poems, that Catholic journals, and Christian journals in general, have welcomed my poems warmly. This, in spite of the […]
October 8, 2013
The Endgame and the Spin
In all high-minded or “holy” group violence, you’ll see two factors at play: The Endgame and the Spin. (Which one of these two gets emphasized and reviled depends on […]
June 4, 2013
Food For Thought, Force-Fed
What is interesting about the force-feeding of inmates at Guantanamo is, first of all, that you have a bunch of supposedly radical, violent Islamists espousing a protest technique, the stubbornly […]
May 11, 2013
Neureligion
There is very little (if any) variability in the brains of human beings regarding cortical localization. That is, the motor cortex responsible for, say, left arm movement, is reliably […]
December 22, 2012
Language as an Artistic Medium
Visual art, language, and music fall along a spectrum whose two ends are the “representative” and the “nonrepresentative.” By “representation” I mean of the physical world. Historically, a visual art […]
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 […]