Author: Tim

• Artists make pretty things for friends

  In the West the creative impulse has come to reside, for the most part, in the space between the artist and his world.  By “world” I mean all that is outside what Martin Buber called an “I-Thou” connection.  That world can be urban or rural, it can be empty of people or can be a street…

• From Ennui to Angst

  The pagan world crippled us with meaningless cycles.  Now that the Jews rescued us from the fatalistic pagan circle and gave us a history that is going somewhere, the somewhere in the distance is what cripples now.  It is meaning, of a sort, but meaning that is not doctrinally clear is just a vague foreboding…

• “Meaning”

  The one central lesson from the history of the West is both obvious and widely evaded: there is no pathway to meaning either in ecstasis or induction.    And the non-Christian East, in despair for thousands of years, has failed to advance their root assertion – that the very need for meaning is illusion.   Turns…

• Conspiracy Theorists and Intelligent Design

  1.  The uncritical attribution of malignant design I know a man who is paranoid.  I don’t mean he is sometimes anxious that others are out to get him, or that he is occasionally dramatic about threats.  No, he is paranoid, which means he observes a phenomenon, and then projects onto the unseen backstage of that…

• The Mind Puzzles, The Feelings Feel, The Heart Wants

  I’d like to save you some time. Here’s a list of perpetual arguments, the ones that have been going on long enough that everyone should have figured out the debate is not actually progressing. Neither of the two antagonistic parties ever wins. This is a shortened list, you probably have heard other versions of these:…

• Memorial Day 2008

  see also Memorial Day 2007. So God enters human flesh under a military dictatorship.  During His short mortal life the freedom fighters try to enlist Him but He declines; He has other interests.  This lack of interest in political freedom is one of the things that gets Him tortured to death.  He does not resist…

• Studeo: eager to study

  First Things » Blog Archive » One College That’s Getting It Right Like many of us reading these pages, I was in the middle of that spring migration known as “bringing the kid home from college for the summer break” (and, we hope, the summer job). My daughter and I were having breakfast at the…

• G. K. Chesterton: “Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals…”

  Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible — at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name…

• Alice Walker’s distraction

  You remember that book “Intellectuals”, by Paul Johnson?  The one where he studied these famous ideologues to see how their private lives were so narcissistic and destructive, despite their public theories for re-arranging everyone else?  (Think Karl Marx.) Well, add Alice Walker to the list.  Seems like a pattern for famous artists in particular. How…

• Peter Leithart: Wedding Sermon

  Peter Leithart:  “Wedding Sermon” is just magnificent: ….As the Spirit joins Father and Son, so He joins fathers and sons across the gap of generations. No generation can be healthy if it is dominated by one spirit. A generation dominated by the spirit of sons breaks from the past in revolution, and a generation that…