After I posted DeeplyGrieved.com (a few posts down), my wife mentioned to me another important “indicator that something is screwy” that I had missed. Once someone has enlisted in what I call “the fellowship of the grievance” (FOG) all other differences with other members of that fellowship fade into the background. Adversaries become cobelligerents, and …
Lonely Artists Congregate
“Likewise in the United States: believe men, you can get all the tubes of Winsor & Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating to New York all the same . . . You can see them six days a week . . . hot off the Carey airport bus, lined up …
Bless Me, What Do They Teach Them In These Schools?
One of the posts yesterday on justice generated a really fruitful discussion, and here is a follow up to some of those issues. When Peter and Susan go to the old professor about Lucy’s weird behavior, he gives them a basic lesson. Edmund was saying sane things, but his character was problematic. Lucy was saying …
Immanuel Kant and Tom Hanks
Brian Mattson has a good post here on Kant and a Tom Hanks movie. What cracks me up is God’s irony in naming — Old Immanuel “God with us” Kant.
The Cape and Beret Problem
“The artist was still the Gentleman, not yet the Genius. After the French Revolution, artists began to leave the salons and cénacles, which were fraternities of like-minded souls huddled at some place like the Café Guerbois rather than a town house; around some romantic figure, an artist rather than a socialite, someone like Victor Hugo, …
What Universe?
As I continue my kibbitzing about postmodernism, using Stanley Grenz’s primer on the subject for my launching points, I want to reiterate that I am not yet directly critiquing Grenz. There are some indirect critiques of how he represents the pomos, but we won’t see until later in the book how much distance he (successfully …
Hamas, Pat Robertson, Little Geneva, and You
All right. Let’s stop fooling around with the tame stuff and talk about ethnically sensitive issues. Pat Robertson recently put his foot in it by saying that God was judging Ariel Sharon (via that stroke) because Sharon dared to divide the land of Israel (by relinquishing Gaza). The general outcry was indignant and self-righteous, and …
The Cult of Intolerance
“And that was the final irony: that an intellectual establishment that had dedicated itself for thirty-five years to the Nonjudgmental gods of tolerance and open-mindedness should finish as an anti-intellectual cult of intolerance, propped up and held in place by a vast network of cultural prohibitions and quasi-legal injunctions, and distinguished chiefly for its poverty …
Gluggity Gluggity
“‘It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles,’ said Pope: ‘the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out’” [Bryan F. Griffin, Panic Among the Philistines (Chicago, Regnery Gateway, 1983), p. 183.]
A Democratic Downgrade
“The phenomenon was in part merely an unpleasant by-product of mass education: a man who might have done no harm as a head footman a century or two ago can do tremendous harm as an assistant professor or a film critic.” [Bryan F. Griffin, Panic Among the Philistines (Chicago, Regnery Gateway, 1983), p. 183.]