Posts
Posts are syndicated across various social media networks—find them here and join the discussion.
-
Becoming a Professional
Previously, in “Becoming a Person,” I wrote, with no great originality: Incidentally, coherent personhood has been the assumption behind rational government (all but Louis XIV’s Le etat, c’est moi), especially republican democracy. Voting, opinion polls, representation, and constitutions all depend on the assumption that citizens are coherent persons. The same goes, of course, for all…
-
Becoming a Person
The New York Times week in review, blessedly (and quoting the fabulous journal The New Atlantis), quotes William James on attention this week. The point, naturally, is yet another condemnation of our relentlessly multitasking, over-busy mental society. But there is so much more in this pregnant piece: To James, steady attention was thus the default…
-
Becoming a Generation
My generation continues to … flounder. Our biggest news lately was the Iowa caucus, when Barack Obama made a surprising showing, which the exit polls attributed to the youth vote—students had come back early to their campuses to caucus. The next day, as the whole show moved to New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton started making her…
-
The Theory of Double Truth
Have you ever had the desire, the urge, the dangerous little need to contradict yourself for its own sake? Or for the sake of something quite unspeakable? The words “paradox” and “contradiction” come eerily close to being synonyms—they mean the same encounter of irreconcilables—yet they connote different moods. A contradiction is the dumbest, most obvious…
-
The Local Neighborhood Conspiracy
Religion Dispatches has just put up my review of Jeff Sharlet’s book, The Family, about a secret Christian political organization headquartered in my hometown of Arlington, Virginia. Like the emperor’s new clothes, power is invisible to those who don’t happen to know about it. One could, as I did, spend eighteen years growing up less…
-
Don’t You Love It When Your Day Is in a Play?
I don’t know how many of you all out there have been spending your days like me, combing through proofs for and against the existence of God and trying to write clever things about them. But if you are, have I got a play for you: The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist, now playing…
-
Early Morning Raid
I’ve got a new video up now to join the rest of them, a music video of the previously unheard-by-anyone-except-me song “Afghanistan.” The song is set to some video I got of a wild thunderstorm in New York the other night, which looked so much like a bombing raid that I had to juxtapose it…
-
New York State of Mind
In a new way I was struck today with what six months in New York (pretty much to the day) can do to a person. I came here originally, to be sure, with a mission. Not quite “to make my fortune” but close. For love and friends, of course, but also to try my hand…
-
An Exchange on Adi Da
For the last several days, I’ve been in email contact with someone named John Forth, a devotee of the new religious movement leader Adi Da. It began when I received an email from him, possibly related to an earlier Row Boat post, that was clearly an anonymous form letter. It was filled with links to…
-
Oh Soul Most Dear to My Soul
Anselm, the eleventh-century discoverer of the ontological proof for the existence of God, archbishop of Canterbury, and authority on Trinitarian doctrines, is not much known for his views on friendship. Yet, especially in his letters, it was a subject of great concern to him. The ecstasy with which he speaks of and in friendship seems…