Cure-alls and Remedies
Modernity of our sort produces a certain kind of despair and helplessness because the primary sources of hope are technological development and the institutional efforts of technocrats. The best hope of progress is always elsewhere: the Supreme Court, Silicon Valley, the Justice Department. Looking back we see lots of progress but no role for ourselves in achieving more.
[caption id=”attachment_3215″ align=”alignright” width=”224″] by flickr user ChrisM70[/caption] I’ve just finished an article on higher education and the liberal arts, and it’s full of hope and comes to some definite conclusions about particular ways that an education in the liberal arts is valuable. It’s out for peer review right now, which means that if the…
[caption id=”” align=”alignleft” width=”320″ caption=”Blame it on REM”] [/caption] I had the pleasure and discomfort of attending parts of the Reason Rally on Saturday, a march on Washington by atheists, agnostics, and heathens . It was cold, rainy, and frequently quite boring. I mostly went to see Bad Religion , but I enjoyed Eddie Izzard’s…
I made the mistake of teaching a set of essays on gay marriage at the end of the semester. I call it a “mistake” because I find it very difficult to give my traditional charitable interpretation to the work of folks like John Finnis and Robert George, who make arguments from a definition of marriage…
In a previous post , I argued deception robbed sexual and marriage partners of their capacity to grant informed consent: attempts to reduce consent to the simple act of saying “yes” actually ignore the ways in which fraudulently representing oneself may be coercive. We can hate the bigotry and prejudice that make the lies seem…
I’ve been really troubled by Proposition 8’s passage in California. It’s a strange kind of melancholy, because I’m already married, and I live in the DC area, so there’s no practical impact on me at all. Trying to explain this weirdly vicarious disappointment, I realize that it was arguments about marriage equality that first convinced…
Antoinette and I have decided to pursue a self-uniting marriage license. Basically, it allows a couple to get married without an officiant. I guess instead of ‘getting married’ it allows the couple to ‘marry themselves.’ It’s only available in Pennsylvania and Colorado, and at least in Pennsylvania it often goes by the title ‘Quaker marriage,’…
I’ve been distracted by travel… first I went to the Arendt Circle in Louisvlle, Kentucky, then to Pennsylvania where I selected a site for my wedding! I volunteered to become the Arendt Circle’s webmaster, which means my online time will be further divided between setting up a website for them, my time on metafilter, and…
The Boston Globe has a long story about the shift in marriage rates for educated women . It looks like: 1. “The median age for a first marriage nationally is now 25.5 for women and 27 for men. It is even higher for those with graduate degrees. In Massachusetts, the median age at first marriage…
George Lakoff responds to Steven Pinker’s review of Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea. Highlights include shocking charges of deception or incompetence on both sides. This is the only paragraph of vitriol-free prose I could find in the review, and since it’s mostly summary I’ll include it here: Lakoff’s theory is aimed…
So in the last post, I showed how the initial versions of Christian judgment were remarkably modest and fallibilist with regard to other people. This makes a certain amount of sense, since Augustine was attached to a fairly rationalist theology, and always gave both doctrinal and basically ethical reasons for his judgments. (For instance, with…
I can never decide whether to call myself a ‘liberal.’ A lot of the time, you’re only presented with two options, and I think in those situations it’s okay to glom on to some basic party affiliation: Democrat/Republican, leftist/rightie, progressive/conservative, etc. But when you’re writing about yourself, you’ve got the power to present yourself in…