- Powered by
- WordPress
-
Hooked Into Machine
Everything’s provided Consummate Consumer Part of worldly taking Apart from worldly troubles Living in your prewar apartment Soon to be your postwar apartment And you lived in the future And the future It’s here It’s bright It’s now – Regina Spektor “Hooked Into Machine” From time to time the tool-making capacities of the human animal…
-
Parish: A Village in the City
In reference to the insatiable thrust of Capital running rampant over livelihoods, and of the political directorates continued subservience to financial interests (in this case the European Union, but just as well America or Canada) the Italian philosopher and media theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has this to say: “Peaceful demonstrations will not suffice to change…
-
An Intellectual Magpie: Food for Thought
We believe we think with our brain, but I think with my feet. It is only there that I come up against something hard. Sometimes, I think with the muscles of my forehead when I bump into something. I have seen enough electro-encephalograms to know there is no shadow of a thought. -Jacques Lacan Sufficiently…
-
The Real Thing
One of my initial reasons for starting this blog was as an impetus to write and to sort out my thoughts, particularly with reference to Maurice Blondel’s philosophy of action. Here’s an interesting link to a piece in the Guardian newspaper which very effectively illustrates the perils of blogging, particularly about action, as blogging has…
-
Chronicles of Narnia and the Imperialist Dogma of a "New World"
Growing up C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia were a staple fare in my literary diet. I was familiar with, and largely uncritical of, the standard evangelical interpretation of these works, namely that it was the story of Christ transposed into an imaginative and magical world and good triumphing over evil and so forth. Later on…
-
New Barbarisms.
The following is a poem I wrote some time ago. It strikes me as in keeping with the general direction of this blog, as well as to the phantasmatic and pietistic nature of the internet in general and blogs in particular. The architectural setting of this poem is an apartment. The Civilized Subject Confined to…
-
Love, Not an Evil Thing
Well, the latest of St.Margaret’s Slater-Maguire lectures has come and gone and I am left to ponder what exactly it has to say to the current Canadian/Christian intellectual scene.The speaker was one Father Raymond de Souza, a Catholic priest, economist and columnist for the National Post. He offered an overview of the latest of the papal…
-
On the Life of Pi,Religion, and an Eavesdropping Coffee Drinker
The character of Pi, in Yann Martel’s novel the “Life of Pi” is to my mind a brilliant subversion of the standard (bland) liberal thesis on the freedom/equality of religions. Not content with the belaboured tolerance of modernity -to each her own, I have my truth you have yours etc – Pi becomes the dedicated devotee…
-
Crime as Vocation
In a recent issue of the New Left Review I came across a delightful anecdote about Diogenes the Cynic. Meeting the Oracle at Delphi Diogenes is entrusted with the task of falsifying, or defacing, the common currency.Upon further research of this story the details became murkier. Variations of the story run that Diogenes, or his…
-
The Gateway of Faith
It is not from thought that faith passes over into the heart, it is from practice that it draws down a divine light for the spirit. God acts in this action and that is why the thought that follows the act is richer by an infinity than that which precedes it. It has entered into a new…