James K.A. Smith recently made a good start in reviewing Greg Boyd’s book on Christians in politics. Justin Taylor had linked to it, and here it is. The book reviewed was The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church. The review seemed promising, and Smith scored some good …
Three Cheers
I recently saw part of a commercial for the “Girls Gone Wild” videos, in which some nubile young idiots were enticed — by the presence of cameras (the device that may not be denied), and by the beckoning promise of fleeting immortality — to flash everybody. These poor souls did not know that they had …
Just So Many Millions of Ghosts
First, a recap of a basic argument against postmodernity. For all the talk about being in a postmodern era, the basic infrastructure of modernity (liberal democracy with its neutral public square) is retained. In the seminar room called modernity, some who call themselves postmodernists have come to believe that they can change the room they …
High Zwinglianism
In his chapter “Against Sacraments,” Peter Leithart quotes Mike Featherstone, who pointed out that postmodernism “moved beyond individualism with a communal feeling being generated,” which is good, but did so in a way in which people “come together in temporary emotional communities” (AC, p. 74), which is entirely inadequate. To this Leithart observes, “The postmodern …
Don’t You Love Science?
“The association of eugenics with race, social class and the emerging ideas about ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ cultures was unmistakable. The terms themselves were first used around the turn of the century to describe people of intellectual or aesthetic superiority (highbrow) or inferiority (lowbrow). They were derived from phrenology, a nineteenth-century practice widely used in determining …
Wanting What He Wants
“Rivalry does not arise because the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it. In desiring an object the rival alerts the subject to the desirability of the object. The rival, then, serves as a model for the subject, not only in regard …
What Is A Highbrow?
“Harper’s Magazine examined the three categories at mid-century. ‘What is a highbrow?’ the writer asked, followed by three replies. ‘A highbrow is a man who has found something more interesting than women,’ Edgar Wallace, a writer of crime novels and thrillers once said. Harper’s writer thought that too vague, but that Columbia professor and author …
Federal Scapegoating
“If the entire community were not already subsumed under a single head, that of the surrogate victim, it would be impossible to attribute to the sacrificial substitution the significance we have claimed for it, impossible to establish a social basis for the institution. The original act of violence is unique and spontaneous. Ritual sacrifices, however, …
Like Toothpaste
” . . . in the aftermath of a controversy over The Birth of a Nation in 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the cinema a ‘business pure and simple’ and not an art form to be protected by the First Amendment. The movies, then, could be regulated as a consumer product” (William Romanowski, Pop …
The Guilt Sponge
“The city of Athens prudently kept on hand a number of unfortunate souls, whom it maintained at public expense, for appointed times as well as in certain emergencies . . . The rite is therefore a repetition of the original, spontaneous ‘lynching’ that restored order in the community by reestablishing, around the figure of the …