Category: Posts
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The Self-making Man
On Religion Dispatches this morning, I’ve got a new review of Thomas Carlson’s latest book, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human. Carlson was my philosophy teacher at UC Santa Barbara—and a remarkable teacher at that. We worked harder in his graduate seminars that in any other class, and every bit was worth…
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Calling Farm Animals!
In the latest issue of the Brooklyn Rail, I’ve got an essay about this wonderful new organization co-led by my friend Aaron Gross called Farm Forward. Though they’ve already done a ton of work on a shoestring budget, just last month they officially launched at the Tribeca penthouse of Alexis Stewart, daughter of Martha. What…
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The Future of Publishing Round-up
This month I left my part-time job at The New York Times. Actually, now that I’m done, I can forget about Times style conventions and write “the New York Times” or even “the New York Times”! Very satisfying. Anyway. It was a fine place to work (particularly thanks to the cafeteria) but after a year,…
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Can Islam Save the Economy?
Today Religion Dispatches published an article that came out of my travels in the Middle East last fall. It’s about the financial and philosophical subculture of Islamic economics—the attempt to create an economic system consistent with religious law. This stuff has attracted a lot of attention lately because the very financial instruments that triggered the…
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Resources for Compassion
Last night the distinguished (and remarkably cheerful) legal philosopher Martha Nussbaum spoke in New York at the William Alanson White Institute to a crowd of graying analysts and a handful of rambunctious kids in the back from Brown’s class of ’06. Guess which I was. The title of the talk was “Compassion: Human and Animal.”…
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The Origins of Knowledge
In book XII of Metaphysics, Aristotle is on a roll. He has already figured out the causes and workings of the earthly world and, by book’s end, will have mounted the summit of God—the prime mover, for the love of whom all things move. The final step before this, however, lies with the stars. At…
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A Faith-based Initiative
Okay—another article with the same basic gist I’ve been harping on this month. Nonviolence in statist discourse, etc… This time I take on Obama and Martin Luther King, Jr., in particular the latter’s 1967 speech at Riverside Church on Vietnam. Why can we still only celebrate King’s nonviolence in the civil rights movement but not…
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Simple Gifts
The inauguration, blessedly, has happened. A wonderful calm settled during the performance of “Air and Simple Gifts,” a piece composed for the occasion by John Williams, the official composer of the Hollywood blockbuster. The new vice president had been sworn in, and we still awaited the new president. As well as a nod to Aaron…
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An Experiment in Faith
More on nonviolence. I hope this isn’t dull to some of you. To me it is an important conversation to have in anticipation of the new administration entering office, when any radical hope feels, for the moment, more thinkable than usual, more possible. In several recent articles and posts relating to nonviolence (here, here, and…
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We Buy Conversation
If a couple’a stubble-faced young guys came up to you on the street waving dollar bills and shouting that they wanted to buy your conversation or a secret you’ve never told anyone, what would you do? Today, at Bryant Park in Manhattan, that was Andrew Marantz, Ben Brown, and me. We were the New York…