Tag: writing
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The Pleasure of the Text
Jean-Luc Marion, at the outset of God without Being: One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure. During the year of my becoming a Catholic, that frought and crazy and inevitable year, I bought a New Oxford Annotated Bible from my college bookstore. Its over two thousand pages flop between…
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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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Questions for Mark Lilla
The Social Science Research Council has just posted on its website an interview I did with Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia and, most recently, author of The Stillborn God. We had a most pleasant conversation. In particular, I asked about his experience of the discussion about his book on the SSRC’s blog, The…
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The Feast of Father Louis
In the Catholic Church, it is traditional to celebrate a saint not on the day of his or her birth, as we do for American presidents, but on the day of death. Part of the reason is that so many of the saints were martyrs, whose status depends precisely on the way they died. They…
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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…