Is There a Darwin Litmus Test?
My first piece for The Guardian is up here.
Month: August 2010
“No True Scotsman” Gambit
And Mark Chu-Carroll has had enough if it: If you talk to a christian about, say, the holocaust, they’ll say that the Nazi’s weren’t really christian. The crusaders who raped and pillaged their way across Europe? Not really christian. The inquisitioners, who tortured and killed all of those innocent people in the name of christianity?… Continue reading “No True Scotsman” Gambit
Frank Kermode RIP
Anything he wrote was well worth reading, more than once. Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held “virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles”, according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at… Continue reading Frank Kermode RIP
On Literary Immortality
Bill Vallicella has a tough piece on Hitchens and his hope to live on in his works. For what he takes to be the illusion of immortality, Hitch substitutes literary immortality. “As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect, not in the hereafter, he concluded, ‘Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and —… Continue reading On Literary Immortality
Lemaitre
Brad Miner over at The Catholic Thing has a nice tribute to Lemaitre and his work.