The Word vs. Special Effects

“While the Renaissance careened after the image, the Reformation became a predominately word-based movement . . . the real religious fervor and intellectual power pulled to the north, so that England, Scandinavia, and Germany became the realm of the word, and the south returned to spectacle” (Arthur Hunt, The Vanishing Word, p. 78).

An Epistemological Pileup

All right. As far as I can make out, our debate over Sarah Palin revolves around three distinct issues, all three of which have merged in a highly entertaining and jumbled fashion — a sort of epistemological pile-up. The first is the propriety of voting for a Republican. A large number of us (myself included) …

Secret Love Child of a Hot Dog Vendor

Let me start with the obvious negative. Sarah Palin thinks a whole lot more of John McCain than I do. So there’s that. And let me leave aside (but just for the moment) all the questions about a Christian mother’s roles and responsibilities. We will get to more of that in future posts. The discussion …

Making Karl Rove Look Like a Piker

Just to keep things interesting, we now read this. Sarah Palin and her husband were at one time members of the Alaska Independence Party, a party that stands for secession from the US of A, among other things. This story just keeps getting better and better. Why that should be controversial, I surely don’t know. …

John Knox and Sarah Palin

One quick niggling contextualizing comment off to the side. John Knox’s famous missive, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, has been mentioned a couple times in the comments of this discussion about Sarah Palin. John Knox wrote the booklet, aiming it at Bloody Mary, a vicious persecutor of the …

Cons and Pros on Palin

I am continuing in the mode of thinking out loud about all of this. I have appreciated many of the comments, pro and con, for the most part, and so please continue the discussion. It would probably be good, though, to discontinue passing on the bat crap “research” that the desperate left is coming up …

Kinda Spooky When You Think About It

Sorry for the delay in getting to this issue. Yesterday was wall-to-wall with events, and since Palin was a surprise pick, I had to get up to speed. I want to divide my comments up into three categories — a statement of the problem as it was, some punditry, and some personal observations and reactions …