Tag: personhood
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Oprah-atic Citizenship
I’m really excited to announce that my interview with Kathryn Lofton, one of the most creative and brilliant young scholars of religion around right now, is now up at The Immanent Frame. Katie is a historian by trade, but over the years she has also cultivated a powerful fascination with Oprah, leading to her new…
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Have You Heard of Rashi?
The day my essay, “The Self-Thinking Thought” appeared on the New York Times blog Happy Days, I received a letter that went thusly: I read your blog on Anselm; quite interesting. Your name sounds Jewish, and although you said you are Catholic, do you have Jewish ancestry? What do you know about Rashi, the great…
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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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What You Mess with When You Mess with Star Trek
The following is cross-posted at Marc Andreottola’s excellent new moving pictures blog, CINEMA IS YOUR SYMPTOM. Keep an eye on that one, believe me. The trailer for the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie came out last week. My RSS feed lit up, as they say, like a Christmas tree. No fewer than three Facebook…
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Empathy in Action
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been an ongoing back-and-forth over in the comments at a recent post, which have forced me to explain more fully some earlier statements about empathy as a political virtue and skepticism as an intellectual habit. Joel, who has been patient enough to draw me out on these things, has…
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Clarify Your Position
This passage from Henry Miller’s late book, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, has long spoken to me. I first found it when I was eighteen, the summer of a month-long solo road trip across the United States and back, the climax of which was the discovery of Big Sur. Those were my…