Tag: language
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A Holiday from Politics?
I’m a little perplexed by the new review of Thank You, Anarchy by Adam Kirsch, an editor of The New Republic among other things. Short of outright disapproving of my book, he replays a common liberal dismissal of Occupy. “For the vast majority of Americans, it was little more than a news story,” he begins,…
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A Law Higher than the Law
Law, law, law. The other day I published an essay about the renegade lawyer William Stringfellow. Today I’ve got a new one at Harper’s?exploring what Occupy Wall Street has to do, if anything at all, with the First Amendment. Most people think it does, and I think they’re mostly wrong. Here’s a bit of it:…
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Harvey Cox and the Future of Faith
I mentioned Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian best-known for his 1960s book The Secular City, in my recent Guardian piece on “death of God” theology. Today, at The Immanent Frame, I have an interview with him about his recent retirement ceremony, the legacy of his early-career bestseller, and his latest work, The Future of Faith,…
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Curious, Obscene, Terrifying, and Unfathomably Mysterious
I am going off to write about people. An ordinary proposition, it would seem, particularly for a person who makes a living writing for people and, typically, about people or the things they think about and create. For the next month, I’ll be joining my friend Lucas Foglia in Costa Rica to spend time with…
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Taking Our Bombs Too Lightly
As far as I can recall, Jeffrey Stout is the only person who has managed to make me come close to tears at an academic lecture. The occasion was his plenary at the 2007 American Academy of Religion meeting in San Diego, later published in the JAAR as “The Folly of Secularism.” At the time…
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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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Giving Bad Directions
Last night, while waiting for a friend at the corner of Lafayette and Bleeker, I learned that to stand at a busy corner near a Manhattan subway entrance means becoming a directions machine. In the course of half an hour, maybe eight people asked me for directions. I’m a guy with a pretty good sense…