But Romans frequently criticized the Christian emphasis on love as somehow a little deluded and perhaps prurient, suggesting that followers of the Jesus Way made it known that theirs was a path of love. Early Christians insisted that love–not rationality or politics or even virtue–was the primary bond between God and humans beings. Love was…
Category
Painting
Dobby Gibson’s Titles Left Unpoemed
1. Colonial Voice-over 2. When That I had Bus-Stop Patience 3. Go Deep 4. A New Category of Response to Beautiful Women 5. I Am the Stringer, I Am the Strung 6. The 90-Percent-Solution Solution 7. Ode to Emancipated Minors 8. Real Falling 9. From Book XVI: The Lingerie Wars 10. Why Me Poet 11….
La Comparsa En Oriente by Thomas Merton
Drums of the early evening wake The mountain full of ore, and the canebrake. Up at Cobre tall tambores call One who rings gangarias with a nail, One with feathers for sleeves, One whose arms are birds, One with a mouth full of great fires And lights instead of words. Excerpt of La Comparsa En…
So what is your poem about?
In “The Well Wrought Urn” — that well-known and well-wrought book of literary criticism — Cleanth Brooks described what he called “the heresy of paraphrase.” The main idea — that efforts at paraphrasing poetry into prose fail in ways that parallel attempts for prose do not — was not new. It has been generally agreed…
Political Warfare, Baudrillard and the Hyper-Real Debt Crisis
The debate we have just witnessed has shown Washington, D.C. not just to be broken, but corrupt. The American people are disgusted watching politicians play political chicken with the nation’s economy and future. In such a bitter and unprincipled atmosphere, whoever has the political clout to enforce their self-interest and retain their privileges wins the…
John of The Cross’ Luminous Darkness and True Religious Art
It is what John of the cross called “luminous darkness,” and it explains the simultaneous coexistence of deep suffering and intense joy in the saints, which would be impossible for most of us to even imagine. Eastern Orthodoxy believed that if something was authentic religious art, it would always have a bright sadness. I think…
Synthetic Appropriation and Protraction of the Body in Pain
I didn’t realize I had a hole in my shirt until I put it on and walked out the door. Quietly close to ignorance that only lasts until it’s chased away. Don’t we all have holes in our shirts… Further more, holes in our hearts? Our tattered dignity is draped around our form, smelling like…
The Self Knows That Self Is Not Enough: Kathleen O’Dwyer, Is Love An Art?
“The human need for love is rooted in our awareness of our individual separateness and aloneness within the natural and social worlds. This is one of the existential dichotomies which characterize the human condition: “Man is alone and he is related at the same time” (Fromm, Man for Himself, 1947). Many philosophers have addressed this…
Philosophical Zombie Attack!
Zombies in philosophy are imaginary creatures used to illuminate problems about consciousness and its relation to the physical world. Unlike those in films or witchraft, they are exactly like us in all physical respects but without conscious experiences: by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie. Yet zombies behave just like…
White Girls on Trial: Casey Anthony and Amanda Knox
I admit I know virtually nothing about the trial of Casey Anthony, who is accused of killing her almost three-year-old toddler, Caylee. I find the media and the public’s obsessive preoccupation with this murder trial to be morbid, just as it was with the 1996 Jon Benet Ramsey murder case. But, most of all, I…