Thou Vain Toy, Part II [ PDF Link ] How can we be done perspectivizing? Yesterday I offered a load of underlinings from an essay by Morse Peckham. As a kind of “proof” text I suggested Ahab’s smashing of his Quadrant as a stance against the “sight” heavenward rather than keeping one’s eyes “level” with the horizon [...]
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The Jesus-Prop–The State at War and the Lie of Humanitarianism
You’ve read rant upon rant about the topics in the title of this post if you’ve stopped here for any length of time or visited now and then over the months. One runs down. But there are other voices, better, and stronger. Melville’s, for one, who’s book, White Jacket, is, in the main, about the [...]
To Be a Man’s Man in a Man’s Machined World
Carrying Forward Joe’s Vision Mormon Scholars Testify–Todd Humphreys Why do I go to church? Why do I believe? Probably not for any reasons that would convince the skeptic. It’s easy to find the illogic and inconsistency in professions of faith. And a Mormon’s testimony, with its references not only to Jesus Christ as our resurrected [...]
Manufacturing Global America
1849 Ere coming in sight of Uma, we put into a little bay, to pay our respects to Hevaneva, a famous character there dwelling; who, assisted by many journeymen, carried on the lucrative business of making idols for the surrounding isles. Know ye, that all idols not made in Maramma, and consecrated by Hivohitee; and, what is more, in [...]
The Seeming Banality
Besides, this Bland, the master-at-arms, was no vulgar, dirty knave. In him—to modify Burke’s phrase—vice seemed, but only seemed, to lose half its seeming evil by losing all its apparent grossness. (Melville, White Jacket) No doubt evil can be normalized, institutionalized, and even made socially just and proper in its place. Does Arendt hold Eichmann to [...]
Extreme Thinking Errors: Tough-Love Christian Boarding Schools and the Indiana Department of Child Services
In a clip from Kidnapped for Christ, Kate Logan’s movie debuting next year, a homosexual U.S. teenager named David describes how men, to “de-gay” him, woke him in the night, dragged him by his belt, and drove him to an airplane which flew him to a Dominican Republic boarding school operated by a fundamentalist religious [...]
A Gospel Truth
It’s nothing new, but we must keep these things in front of us…recall when we found out that the US Military had infused (was it already) Christian War Theology as a way to influence (brainwash) its members (men and women with guns encouraged to use them to kill people) in what has been presented to [...]
The Money Virtue As American Rational Religion
The most virtuous and honest character in Dickens’ Hard Times, Stephen Blackpool, often confronts the confusion, ambiguity, paradox, and unfairness of “interests” with an aggrieved and exasperated cry that “it’s all such a muddle.” Even his virtuous acts of self-protection are disallowed by law, but the law is one that restricts the impoverished while it [...]
The Child of the Marketplace Metaphor
Since the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, organized in covenants as a joint stock company, imagined themselves a mystic brotherhood reborn in the body of Christ, American history has progressed under the sway of two, conflicting vocabularies. One, the language of exterior, marketplace relations, takes the contract as its master symbol. The other, the language of [...]
Training in Belief and Reason
On the a.m. dog-walk I listened to a podcast regarding, primarily, the “will to believe.” (“Psychological Anthropology” on Entitled Opinions) The author/academic (Tanya Luhrmann) interviewed has written at least two titles on modes of belief, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, an investigation into modern practitioners of magic in London, and When God Talks Back, field [...]
