The Middling Mind of Terry Gross
Replace Terry Gross with RTE Radio One
For Saint Anselm, reason is itself rooted in God, so that one can attain it fully only through faith. This is part of what he means by his celebrated assertion “I believe in order to understand” — a proposition which in a different sense could also apply to believers like socialists and feminists. Because you already take a passionate interest in women’s liberation, you can come to understand the workings of patriarchy better. Otherwise you might not bother.
All reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of faith, attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition, or prior commitment. As Pascal writes, the saints maintain that we must love things before we can know them, presumably because only through our attraction to them can we come to know them fully.
—Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, 120. (via thirstygargoyle)
E.O. Wilson recently complained that the humanities offer an “incomplete” account of culture, ethics and consciousness (and kindly offered to complete the account by removing the humanities from the picture completely). What Wilson sees as a bug is in fact a feature. The humanities are and should be incomplete by design—that is, there should be no technology or methodology which we might imagine as a future possibility that would permit complete knowledge achieved via humane inquiry nor should we ever want such a thing to begin with.
Politicizing the Papal Transition: A Retrospective The Chant Café
Journalists are risk averse and rationally ignorant!
if you’re spending six hours a day fiddling around online to avoid doing your own work you should stop that
—Jessa Crispin, editor-in-chief at bookslut.com, on being a writer (via jujutsu-with-zizek)
But I also think culture and economics, ideas and incentives, are all entangled at a deep level, working in cycles and feedback loops rather than in simple causal arrows — and thus it’s a mistake to treat changes in what people believe, and particularly the sweeping generational changes in how Americans conceptualize the links between sex and marriage and procreation, just as epiphenomena of economic pressure. And it’s a particularly convenient mistake for social liberals, because it enables them to downplay the fact that these changes are also their own ideological victories — victories that have been accompanied by, well, many of the negative consequences that social conservatives warned against in the first place. In large ways and small, and now at a suddenly-accelerating pace (today gay marriage, tomorrow marijuana legalization, etc.), we’re getting the culture that social liberalism wants — less traditionally religious and more socially permissive, with fewer normative ideas about how sex and love and childbearing fit together. And if conservatives would profit from acknowledging the economic forces shaping these realities, liberals would profit from acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, a cultural transformation that they’ve long favored is coming at a cost.
—Ross Douthat (via ayjay)
(via bluedollar)
