Updated. Circling Coldhearted Murder The Execution of Tropmann” is an essay by Ivan Turgenev that explores the ethical issues surrounding the death penalty and public executions, particularly focusing on the reactions of onlookers. It reflects on the cold-heartedness of the crowd witnessing the execution of Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, a notorious spree killer in France. “Upon witnessing… Read More The Execution of Tropmann
I’ve always loved Camus. But his shadow side must be faced. In his novella, The Fall, the Algerian-French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus stops lamenting social injustice for a moment as well as the “meaninglessness” and “absurdity” of an empty Nietzschean universe in general, and turns instead to biography, specifically to his own cruelty. Camus was a… Read More The Falls of Albert Camus
When a friend called me this morning with the news that Susan Sontag had died at the age 71, just about the first thing I thought was, “well, we’ll have a huge, hagiographical, front-page obituary tomorrow in The New York Times.” Check to see if I am correct. In the meantime, as you prepare yourself… Read More Susan Sontag: a Prediction by Roger Kimball. 2004
“… I discovered a strange coincidence. Among those who survived the carnage of the Great War, two of the 20th century’s greatest religious thinkers had faced one another across exactly the same stretch of the Front on the devastated hillsides to the west of Verdun in June 1916. Both went on to describe their war… Read More Existential Anxiety
The events of 1968 had a strong bearing on his shift to a more conservative outlook. Excerpted from “POPE BENEDICT XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger.” (c) 2000 by John L. Allen, Jr.The Continuum. Joseph Ratzinger arrived at Tübingen [University] in 1966, still enthusiastic about the promise of Vatican II and ready to take his… Read More How the ’60s Changed Ratzinger
Put the news aside for a time. If unhappiness is growing consider it a reset signal to return to philosophy where all education and earthly wisdom began. …This is an excellent series, very informative and very fair to Catholic, Protestant and Enlightenment philosophies. Thales to Sartre and beyond. 81 comprehensive episodes. One can learn something… Read More Dr. Arthur Holmes Lectures. A History of Philosophy.
“God is dead but given the way of men there may be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we will have to vanquish his shadow, too.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, # 109 At the very dawn of the 20th century, on 25 August in the year… Read More “Straying, as through infinite nothingness”: The Collapse of Nietzsche
Norman Geisler, the Evangelical scholar who studied at Loyola University, Chicago, reflects on Jean Paul Sartre’s atheism: “It should be noted … that Sartre’s attempt to eliminate God is seriously flawed. First of all, he constructs a straw God by defining him as “self-caused.” Most theists do not believe God is a self-caused being; they… Read More Sartre’s Humanism
David Starkey tracks the history and influence of the Dada movement of art and its influence in modern culture and life through his experiences with the Royal Academy. BBC: December 3, 2004. An autographed gentleman’s urinal has been named the most influential modern art work of all time. “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which shocked the… Read More April is the cruellest month
Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on “How the New Deal Coalition Fell Apart” in the DNC Chicago riot of 1968. After a moment of goofy kidding around mimicking the “Yippies,” Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland tell the most dramatic story of this seminal event which many of us saw on our TVs, horrifying our… Read More The Riot That Tore the Democratic Party Apart: Chicago 1968.
Or, dreams come true… In No Speed Limit, author and cultural analyst Steven Shaviro writes, “In his science fiction novel Pop Apocalypse, Lee Konstantinou imagines the existence of a “Creative Destruction” school of Marxist-Leninist thought. The adherents of this school “interpret Marx’s writings as literal predictions of the future, so they consider it their mission… Read More The Creative Destruction school of Marxist-Leninist thought.
Before there was Gloria Steinem or Michel Foucault, there was Dada. And it was deadly serious. Kickoff, Demolition time. “Dada thrives on contradictions. It is creative and destructive. Dada denounces the world and wishes to save it.” So says one narrator of journalist-filmmaker Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Council of Great Britain documentary… Read More 1914. Europe After the Rain.
“The issue [of the week] is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”–Students for a Democratic Society, Marxist SDS. Revolutionary Con Man Saul Alinsky. Inciting “Power Responses”: No boys, no girls, no mothers, no fathers, no religion…“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for‘ (Apropos of the above hymn to Obama, ironically, Black… Read More Always the Revolution
I “asked” Bing AI about those who see the traditional family as “a social structure of oppression” and who suggest that the dissolution of the traditional family might or would be a good thing for the world. I asked about those who say boys and girls, men and women, are becoming obsolete categories making room… Read More Catholic “Chat” with Bing AI About the Future, Family and Gender
Aldous Huxley stated plainly, “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption [SH: note that desire preceded investigation]. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with… Read More Huxley’s Faith and Confession
John Gerassi, author of Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, writes, “Sartre thought that my spontaneity in politics meant that, like a woman, first I reacted, then I acted, and only then did I try to justify. To most readers trained by bourgeois rationalizers to “think before you act,” what I’ve just said will… Read More Sartre: “Throw It In His Face!”
Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire “In the arid wasteland that is academic writing, amid the wider desert that is modern secular thought, R. J. Snell’s book on acedia is an oasis of flowers and fruit and fresh water. Professor Snell reminds us that man must never be made subordinate to work, nor even to the empty… Read More Acedia and Its Discontents
An important discussion on our perilous technological time. Orthodox Christian Jonathan Pageau, Ph.D, writes, “This is my second conversation with Paul Kingsnorth. We talk about his brilliant substack, called The Abbey of Misrule, civilization and control, the power of the state and our technological systems, the matrix, politics, what it takes for communities to survive,… Read More Civilization and Control. Jonathan Pageau
Catholic Critique 