Tag: metaphor
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What Do You Believe? How Do You Know? Want a Free Book?
For as long as I’ve been interested in the search for proofs about the existence of God, I’ve been interested in drawing them. Words and equations just didn’t seem like enough; to wrap my head around what these constructs were expressing, and to try to communicate them to others, I had to make pictures. As…
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What I Learned about Empire in the West Bank
The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to…
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Gods Must Die to Live
I’ve been meaning to share this for a while; it’s an arresting passage from C. S. Lewis that came to me on a page sent to my by a friend, a Trappist monk, on the subject I’ve been touching on from time to time here (and here), truth and mythology: The gods—and, of course, I…
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The Truth in Myth
There’s this passage toward the end of the all-important book XII of Aristotle’s Metaphysics that I keep coming back to, one of those bits that reaches out of its antiquity and walks among us. Book XII is where Aristotle’s account of the world beyond physics reaches up from the chains of causes acting on causes…
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Captive Meditation
Prisons in the United States are a profound kind of disaster, and lately I and some friends have been doing some thinking about how the conversation can be changed, away from the self-defeating logic of “tough on crime” to something that will actually, well, be tough on crime, rather than simply tough on the bodies…
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Theology for Atheists
At the Guardian today, I’ve got a short bit about secular, mainly Continental philosophers who, in recent years, have turned to theology: [Slavoj Zizek] is one of several leading thinkers in recent years who, though coming out of a deeply secular and often-Marxist bent, have made a turn toward theology. In 1997, Alain Badiou published…
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Planning Is a New Variety of the Sin of Pride
Jean-Luc Marion wrote, at the opening of his book God without Being, “One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure.” Today, at the remarkable online journal Triple Canopy, I’ve got an essay that’s about the closest thing I’ve so far come to writing theology. It’s called “Divine Wilderness.” It is…
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Transient Vapors
When I got home, when I got the camera, when I jumped out onto the fire escape to take a picture, it looked like this. This is all that was left. But only minutes before, as I rode along Wythe Avenue from Williamsburg to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then most of all just after turning…
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A Symbologist Speaks!
In my Religion Dispatches essay this week about Angels & Demons, I make a crack about the nonexistence of the hero’s stated academic discipline, “symbology.” But maybe I’m wrong. I think I’ve just found a symbologist. Trolling around on the Internet today, I found this Canadian Masonic website which denies the conventional wisdom that the…
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The Illustration Saga
My recent article for the Boston Globe included this unassuming concoction by way of illustration: Sure, it’s nice, but I would have thought no more of it but for a message from my dear friend Thinker Bill Hackett, Santa Barbara?o extraordinaire. He began: I was impressed with the Globe people who did that little illustration.…