Apr 29, 2009 1
Behold, the Lord’s Prayer in Old English:
Fæder úre, ðú ðe eart on heofonum,
Sí ðín nama ġehálgod.
Tó becume ðín riċe.
Ġewurþe ðín willa
On eorþan swá swá on heofonum.
Urne ġedæghwamlíċan hlaf syle ús tódæġ.
And forgyf ús úre gyltas,
Swá swá wé forgyfaþ úrum gyltendum.
And ne ġelæd ðú ús on costnunge,
Ac álýs ús of yfele. Sóþliċe.
You may call me a [...]
Apr 26, 2009 1
Pages upon pages of John Galt self-righteously sneering at all the ‘looters’ (socialists, vegetarians, Christians, liberals, Buddhists, academics, environmentalists, Mexicans, etc.) seem not only like a pathetic attempt to overwhelm a reader who would be impressed by the volume of pages, but also like the product of a small mind. John Galt’s cheery speech was more than my well meaning young-Republican-lite ideology could take. Rand helpfully packaged this ideology in weapons-grade concentration and laid it all out for easy scrutiny and swift rejection.
Apr 24, 2009 0
In response to the essay The Virtues of Rational Religious Belief, by Jason Finley and Kevin Hilke.
I’d like to thank Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke for their willingness to have this exchange. As much as our opinions may differ, I believe it’s important that we keep them open to discussion; I have encountered far too [...]
Apr 19, 2009 0
In January, The Nation published a discursive but fruitful memoiristic essay by Ted Solotaroff, who spent a career in political and literary editing beginning at Commentary in the ideologically tumultuous 1960s. It is illuminating for anyone interested in this period, when the nation’s intellectual heft began to swing decidedly to the right, a swing that determined the political and social structures of our own period, and so one instructive to those who wish to map, influence, or create the political and social structures of the future. Solotaroff gets us inside the heads of some of the people whose contingent decisions and actions set that formation in motion. While the first half of Solotaroff’s piece treats the politics of internecine midcentury literary-political editing, the second traces his relationships with his later writers—after his estrangement from the supercilious Podhoretz and much of the intelligensia that gathered around him—notably Cynthia Ozick and, hugely, the subjectively-unhinged critic, fiction writer, and jetsetting homosexual intellectual Alfred Chester, whose peripatetic life as a self-declared immoralist, vexed by poverty, alienation, and aberrant desire, ultimately made him into a searing and prescient queer moralist.
Apr 12, 2009 1
There is an old joke about easing yourself into a conversation in a party: all you have to do is walk up and say “Yes, but where do you draw the line?” and you will immediately find yourself right at the heart of the discussion. The reason this is funny, and the reason it works, is that most everything worth discussing is a continuum phenomenon. Issues are rarely a matter of ‘black and white,’ yet everyone seems to have an opinion about where one thing ends and another begins. Yet in today’s politics, we are quick to throw out a final answer and call it a day. Issues like gay marriage and abortion pose difficult questions characteristically because there is no simple answer. We should approach these dilemmas with sensitivity befitting of their difficulty.
