The Next Step: Definition, Generalization, and Theory in American Family Law

The Journal of Law Reform\u27s Symposium on Family Law comes opportunely, in legal scholarship\u27s spring of hope, its winter of despair, at a time when we have everything before us, when we have nothing before us. As is natural in such an epoch, reflection about legal scholarship, about its history, purposes, and methods, has flourished. This Symposium invites us to extend that reflection to family law, and this essay attempts, tentatively and speculatively, to accept the invitation

If you don’t let us dream, we won’t let you sleep

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The Burden of Knowing: Camus, Qohelet, and the Limitations of Human Reason

In one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus writes this: “This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.” Here, Camus addresses what he believes to be one of the main sources of the absurd: the limitations of human reason. He claims that his inability to fully understand human reality creates a gap between his existence and its meaning, and, in effect, renders the whole of human experience as absurd. Because Camus makes these conclusions from a purely atheistic position, it would seem that his notion of the absurd is incompatible with a theistic understanding of the human condition. Interestingly, however, the main speaker of the ancient Hebrew wisdom book Ecclesiastes, Qohelet, also concludes that the limits of human knowledge give life a sense of absurdity. Although Camus (an atheist) and Qohelet (a theist) begin with different assumptions regarding the existence of God—the very Being who gives meaning and clarity to his creation—their similar conclusions reveal an unlikely compatibility between atheistic and theistic attitudes towards the human predicament. While Camus and Qohelet recognize that the world cannot be explained by human reasoning, and is therefore absurd, they each conclude that uncertainty and human limitations may prompt a certain liberation and solace that allows them to move beyond the absurd. This curious parallel between Camus’s modern existential attitudes in The Myth of Sisyphus and the ancient Hebraic wisdom of Ecclesiastes show that the awareness of the limitation of human reason may compel man to live authentically and passionately despite the seeming unreasonableness of his life

4. Dumped Into the Drink: Discipleship

Papers given at conf \u27Discovery \u2799: festival of faith and life\u27, Erindale College, Univ of Toronto in Mississauga, June 10-13 1999

Social criticism in Charles Dickens\u27 Hard Times

Charles Dickens might well have been speaking of his own nineteenth- century England instead of revolutionary France of the late eighteenth-century when he wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” It can truly be said that England was being wracked by every sort of revolution that racks a nation except the physical sort that France experienced. Agriculture had been revolutionized by the Enclosure Laws, and the growth of industry has fed the mammoth displacement of farm labor. The church was under fire from several sides, with Puseyism on the one hand and the new evangelical faiths on the other. Reform of government was demanded by the militant Whiggism of the early part of the century, and later the Chartists and Young England demanded reform of the reformers. England\u27s faith was jolted by the discovery of natural science in the early part of the century, and even more thoroughly wrenched by Darwin in the latter part. It was truly an age of extremes, an age of darkness in an age of light. It was an age of “isms,” with the great men of time choosing a system or founding one

Promising Signs

Luke 21:25-3

Culture: Around, Against, In the Church\u27s Worship

(Excerpt) Two weeks ago a Canadian Broadcasting producer in Montreal telephoned me. She had heard of my book, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down, from a few pastors and wanted to know the main points of my approach, because she was preparing a program for Easter to focus on what congregations could do to attract Canadians to worship