“The Christian imagination is not icing for the cake of education. A true understanding of the imagination is at the center of all true education . . . Works of imagination are not the dessert of educaqtion; they are the meal. We have to get the students to master some basic details so that they …
Torn
“This is the paradox of the human self, the mysterious unity of self-centeredness and other-centeredness in all human beings. Even though the two drives go in opposite directions and can never become complementary, they are always combined and their combination binds people inextricably to one another, even as it tears them apart internally and externally. …
If We Had Some Cheese
Westfold argues that Derrida is some kind of a natural law theorist. We can ascertain this from the title of chapter 11, “Derrida As Natural Law Theorist.” Westfold draws a distinction between logical positivists and postmodernists, a distinction that he considers important. The logical positivists said of their own position that it destroyed all ethics …
Art Goes to Seed
“In the sensate style, techniques become elaborate, complex, highly skilled, often showy. They are designed to impress, even to stun viewers. The means used to produce sensate art are varied and enormous in scope. Often a work’s mere size—its hugeness—passes for quality; the bigger a statue or building, the better it is thought to be. …
Truth Has A Face
“However, the biblical story is pretty unwieldy and remains storylike despite our best efforts. But over the course of the last 350 years, we have risen to the occasion and have trained ourselves to think of the story as just so much external baggage carrying around the internal, timeless truths. Depending on how the story …
What Do You Mean “Everybody Doesn”t Think About This All the Time”?
“All individuals beset by mimetic desire are easily fooled into believing that the entire world shares their obsession with their current rival” (Girard, A Theater of Envy, p. 115).
Integral Art
“In technique, integral art approaches perfection. Figures no longer are portrayed frontally. Statues come to life. The means of execution remain moderate but are used to marvelous effect. Though visual in form, the art continues, in the ideational tradition, to ignore the vulgar, the debasing, the ugly, the immoral, the eccentric. If something base appears …
Mystical Ratios
“There are many cultural reasons why we fall into this confusion about grading, many of them having to do with the lust for scientific precision that came out of the Enlightenment. Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen …
Agreeing Too Much
[Freud] “never unraveled the crucial mystery of two or more desires that violently disagree because they agree too much, because they imitate each other” (Girard, A Theater of Envy, p. 104).
Fooba Fooba Fooba
In another essay, Westphal is concerned to deal with the ready identification of postmodernism with various political absolutisms, particularly fascism and communism. In “Deconstruction and Christian Cultural Theory,” Westphal argues that such an assimilation is based on a gross misreading of Derrida and Foucault in particular. “So it is that the temptation to lump postmodernism …