As many of you know, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) turned on yesterday in Geneva. So maybe I should say a little about it, since this is the kind of physics I do for a living. The LHC is a very big deal for physics. It is likely to make the first major breakthrough in particle physics in over . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1948, the abstract artist Barnett Newman wrote, “The impulse of modern art was to destroy beauty.” One among many impulses of recent art has been to piece it together again. It is a beleaguered movement, but promoted by a wide range of figures, from democratic populist Dave Hickey to . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m very thankful that I don’t have a television. We’re heading into the final months of the presidential election, and maybe I’ll be spared the demoralizing experience of so much stupidity conveyed with such seriousness. You know the routine. The news anchor asks, “Jim, did . . . . Continue Reading »
Twenty years ago, Salman Rushdie wrote a novel so shocking that it nearly cost him his life. Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s Supreme Leader, issued a fatwa against the Indian author on account of the blasphemy in his book, The Satanic Verses . Much to the chagrin of the more extreme elements of the . . . . Continue Reading »
American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile . I really like the title of the book I’m writing, in the hope of having it ready for publication in the first part of 2009. That can be a problem in writing books. You fall in love with a title and then labor to build a book around it. But I’m . . . . Continue Reading »
Abortion was made for horror. In abortion, a mother is pitted against her child, the Madonna becomes Medea; and the child, usually a symbol of innocence, is experienced as an invading enemy. The distortions of the pregnant woman’s body are mirrored in the dismemberment of the fetus, and the . . . . Continue Reading »
Three memories have shaped my approach to this year’s general election.Here’s the first. In the late 1970s, during a two-year break from teaching to raise our second son, an adopted child, I found myself at a Los Angeles dinner party filled with DINKs, the “double income, no . . . . Continue Reading »
I have been reflecting here on the ways in which, also for Christians, and maybe especially for Christians, being American is part of our inescapable identity. These reflections will, God willing, be part of a forthcoming book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile .Thought that is real and . . . . Continue Reading »
Every once in a while I come across a perfect book¯not perfect in the sense of flawless or deep or indispensable, but perfect in the sense of being richly representative of an era or ethos or sensibility. Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom is perfect in this way. Uncomplicated, accessible, . . . . Continue Reading »
Deep ecology, a movement launched by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1972, may be contrasted to an environmentalism concerned with the depletion of resources and pollution. For one thing, deep ecology aims at nothing less than a fundamental change in religion, morality, and social . . . . Continue Reading »
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