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Sacred vs. Secular

Our friend Chris Mueller, who directs the music here in New York for Notre Dame, the Polish Dominican parish up near Columbia, joined what you’d have to call the battle of the early music bands last week. Secular vs. Sacred, the event featured Trio Triumvirum , an all-male ensemble singing . . . . Continue Reading »

Shoddy Argument

A nice line on a philosopher: “He wants to substitute rhetoric for argument but without quite giving up argument. So he ends up giving shoddy arguments.” In a good online discussion of truth and Richard Rorty. . . . . Continue Reading »

My Other Car Is A …

From the October issue of Harper’s magazine: Chance a U.S. household that owns a Prius also owns an SUV: 1 in 3. Makes sense: Instead of driving the SUV 100 percent of the time, just drive if half the time and drive the Prius the other half to offset the emissions. Voila!—You’ve . . . . Continue Reading »

Not History but Novelty

Michael Gerson’s latest column bemoans the death of historical meaning in our personal romantic narrative. It’s true that the therapeutic historicism that still seems to undergird a lot of popular culture — people telling their stories to one another — is actually being . . . . Continue Reading »

Dignity and Identity

In comments below on my post about Yuval Levin’s book, Imagining the Future , Michael Peterson asks : “Will someone, somewhere, define human dignity?” Not me, at least not in this post . . . but here’s an account of what needs to happen first. One of the best passages in . . . . Continue Reading »

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