Metaphysical Desire We come now to a fascinating engine of conflict, both in real life and in great fiction. As you will see, Girard argues that poor fiction sidesteps this reality, while great fiction confronts and exposes it wonderfully. We are beginning a genuine study of ourselves and, while we’re at it, a rewarding study …
Mimetic Desire
Brief Bio Rene Girard is a true polymath, and is proving to be one of the most important thinkers of the last century and this. His writing encompasses multiple fields, and he has made profound contributions in all of them. As you will see, his thought includes theology, literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, mythology, sociology, cultural …
City on a Hill
This post ought to be fairly straightforward, because this next chapter by Darryl was, taking one thing with another, outstanding. Of course I am suspicious of where he is placing it, but still the historical review he gives is very, very good. He begins with a discussion of the famous American trope, “a city on …
Liturgical Dualism
INTRODUCTION: There are great dangers facing a congregation engaged in trying to restore a more honestly liturgical and reformed pattern of worship, problems that arise because of good old-fashioned sin. Call it the human factor. THE TEXTS: “Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, Amend your ways and your doings, and I …
Let the Reparation Talks Begin!
“Professor Davis estimates that up to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved by Muslim slave raiders between 1500 and 1800” (Peter Hammond, Slavery, Terrorism & Islam, p. 10).
The Clichéd Rebel
“The authentic man, in the romantic conception, is he who has cut himself free of all convention, who acknowledges no restriction on the free exercise of his will. This applies as much to morals as to aesthetics: and artistic genius becomes synonymous with waywardness. But a being as dependent on his cultural inheritance as man …
That Faithy Feel
Someone of Darryl Hart’s intelligence and learning is incapable of writing a book without offering many penetrating insights, and this book promises to be no exception. He starts out by observing the “tsunami of faith-based politics” (p. 3). He objects to this, as he should, because government sponsorship of a generic faith, or groups that …
Down to the Present
“Nearly 100 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in America, and 130 years after all slaves within the British Empire were set free by parliamentary decree, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, in 1962, and Mauritania in 1980, begrudgingly removed legalized slavery from their statute books. And this only after international pressure was brought …
Parasitic Creativity
“The problem of upholding virtue and denouncing vice without appearing priggish, killjoy, bigoted, and narrow-minded has become so acute that intellectuals are now inclined either to deny that there is a distinction between the two or to invert their value. There is no higher word of praise in an art critic’s vocabulary, for example, than …
When Sin and Death Build the City
I enjoyed getting to meet Darryl Hart at the Auburn Avenue conference last year, and also enjoyed our discussion on the Federal Vision over at De Regno Christi. He’s a good guy, and has many valuable things to offer the church, particularly in the realm of historical analysis. But in our discussion at DRC, the …