In S. Y. Agnon’s 1939 novel A Guest for the Night, one of the protagonists, Daniel Bach, recounts his loss of faith. Throughout World War I, as a soldier in the trenches, he had been meticulous about donning his tefillin to recite his daily prayers. Until one morning, the tefillin . . . . Continue Reading »
At the end of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, the conspirators who had assassinated Caesar, are themselves dead. Brutus has, in fact, fallen upon his sword rather than face capture by the armies of Octavius and Mark Antony. Brutus was bad enough to betray and murder a . . . . Continue Reading »
Just in time for Halloween, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has published an English translation of the hitherto only-in-Latin rite of exorcism. Continue Reading »
Macbeth’s ambition is to murder time itself. He wishes he could perform one act that would bring the end of acting, one final deed. He wants to drop a pebble into a pool without causing ripples. He finds he can’t, and instead each murder just makes it more difficult for him to stop murdering. Continue Reading »
A woman lovingly plucks a dead pheasant. A man places a human arm on a cutting board with care, readying his chef’s knife. A woman sinks into a bathtub, seemingly dropping into an abyss. A corpse is lifted on high, framed by wings made of broken glass.All these images (horrific, gorgeous, . . . . Continue Reading »
In the days since audio was extracted from the black box recorder of crashed Germanwings flight 4U9525 suggesting that copilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately downed the plane, investigators and journalists have rushed to find an explanation for his actions. Continue Reading »
Whom can you trust in a room full of virtual criminals? Continue Reading »
The book of Genesis does not give an ultimate explanation of the origin of evil, for evil is at its heart not explicable or intelligible, just as darkness is by its nature not visible. It stems not from a positive presence but from an absence, not a reason but a form of unreason: a failure, a lack, . . . . Continue Reading »
evil in modern thought: an alternativehistory of philosophy by susan neiman princeton university press, 358 pages, $29.95 René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, begins his Meditations(1641) on the self and its place in the world by supposing that a demon, no less powerful than God, . . . . Continue Reading »
Most Christian thinkers have viewed evil as a privation, a derivative reality, like a shadow. Shadows are privations of light; they are real things, but dependent on the bodies that cast the shadows. They are darkness where light should have been. Similarly evil, a secondary reality, is only the . . . . Continue Reading »
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