As a rule, I don’t like musicals. Well, it’s not “as” a rule. It is a rule. I do not like musicals. I never watched Glee, unless the women at my house were monopolizing the television. I walked out of The Sound of Music; something about Maria racing to the top of a hill singing with no hint of asthmatic reaction ruined it for me. I did stay through Les Misérables, though dying people singing tend to annoy me, but it was operatic and no one was asking me to believe that perfectly ordinary people frequently burst into spur-of-the-moment song. I never break into spontaneous song, not if someone might be listening. Why should anyone else? Continue Reading »
At the beginning of the twentieth century, those Westerners who knew about the Orthodox Church tended to think it exotic and theologically and culturally irrelevant. Orthodox theology was very little known and even less understood, and perhaps even less valued than understood. The Bolshevik . . . . Continue Reading »
Has physics done away with God? A newly release book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow says, “Yes.” What is a Jewish or Christian believer to make of this? Is the Creator now out of a job? … Continue Reading »
Freddie has written a post that forces me into the odd position of defending Sam Harris; the crux of which is the claim that once we accept the human mind as being a contingent accident of evolution, we necessarily must abandon any faith in the intellectual edifices constructed by such minds: For . . . . Continue Reading »
This term I have been teaching Ancient & Mediaeval Political Theory, a course that is crosslisted between the philosophy and political science departments at Redeemer. Yesterday we heard two fine student presentations on Thomas Aquinas’ writings on the virtues (Summa Theologica Ia-IIae, qq. . . . . Continue Reading »
Lord of the storm, spare Kingston’s unkempt port, spare Spanish Town and even Montego Bay. Open your eye only on empty sea. Let vessels reach their quays unscathed, and lashings never snap. Let shantytowns stay roofed, and coconuts not cannonball through walls. Almighty, if it pleases you to rip . . . . Continue Reading »
When St. Augustine abandoned the teaching of rhetoric in Milan to enroll for baptism, he asked St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, what to read in the Scriptures “to make me readier and fitter to receive so great a grace”? Ambrose told him to read the prophet Isaiah. Augustine took his advice, . . . . Continue Reading »
The cover of the New Republic picture this big thick book titled The Constitution of the United States. The real Constitution makes a very thin pamphlet, but with all that some folk have discovered in the Constitution in recent decades, maybe it looks to them like a big thick book. Anyway, the book . . . . Continue Reading »
The Real Story I read with interest and agreement Edward S. Shapiro’s “Blacks and Jews Entangled” (August/September). While there exist shared experiences of oppression, Shapiro notes quite correctly that a black-Jewish relationship should not be based on fanciful notions derived from . . . . Continue Reading »
