The Magical Comeback

“The American church has a relatively short history of assuming that true Christianity disappeared when the last apostle died and did not reappear until the camp meetings on the Kentucky frontier in 1799. Some, more moderate in their views, do not think the church disappeared until the third or fourth century, but it always seems …

Deconstructing Television

“During the long millennia of material scarcity, the customer’s time was what economists call an externality, like air or water. It was an economic asset so readily available that it escaped economic accounting. In the old economy and a holdover in the new, a key rule of commerce was: Waste the customer’s time. This was …

See To The Mash

“It is undeniable that modern liberal regimes have had tremendous success in providing security and prosperity for their citizens. Nevertheless, few of even their most ardent proponents would dare to assert that the political life of such regimes is noble or beautiful. It is harsh, but by no means unfair, to say with Richard Hooker …

Living in Story

One more comment on modernity’s whipping boy, Constantine. One of the central problems with many pomos is that they write turgid philosophy in praise of narrative, but they don’t understand story, and the same goes for their frothy popularizers. As a result, they are the ideal audience for hair-raising melodramatic cliff-hangers. Constantine is converted and …

How Adam Ate the First Orange

“[C]ontemporary research reveals that music possesses universal characteristics that mark it as a similar behavior present in all human societies. For example, the principle of ‘octave equivalence’—the treatment of two pitches, one with a frequency twice that of the other, as the same pitch sounding at different octaves—is ‘present in all the world’s music systems,’ …