Robert Jenson on the enterprise of humanity […] men are those of God’s creatures who have their own true selves not as possessions but as challenges. My humanity is not a set of characteristics that I may be counted on to exemplify: like being vertebrate or brown haired or sapient. My humanity is rather something that […]
readers of [Alasdair] MacIntyre and (to a lesser extent) [Charles] Taylor do not, I hazard to suggest, encounter hiddenness, surprise and opacity in the way that readers of Dostoevsky do. The narratives in which both authors cast their accounts of Western culture inexorably tend towards a certain kind of smoothness and closure, as if every […]
Bruce Marshall on theology’s use of philosophy In his quaestiones on Boethius’s De Trinitate Aquinas asks, as he does on several occasions, whether “philosophical arguments and authorities” can be used in theology – “faith’s science about God.” One of the objectors observes that in scripture the wisdom of the world is often represented by water, […]
Stanley Cavell on the vanity of worldliness Despite Mendel’s* authority and talent, and his capacity to paint the day with fun, I felt about him an air, or skin, of privacy, a perpetual reticence even in his grand laughter, registering a perception that the world held less of value than it promised. I adored him. […]
When it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We will always reach for a “dispositional” explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation. from The Tipping Point, (Back Bay, 2002), 160.
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