Westernizing Islam and the American Right

Excerpt: At the end of The Searchers, John Wayne stands framed by the darkened doorway of a cabin, and with the dry scrub and John Ford vastness behind him he contemplates the house his successful search party has just entered. He looks inside for a second, half smiles, turns, and walks with his John Wayne slouch back into the sandstone and prairie. The door closes in front of the camera, the screen is thrown into blackness, and the credits roll. John Wayne ain’t gonna do civilization: The End

The Beauty of the Ethical: An Everyday Ethics that Brings Grace to Life

Excerpt: Malcolm Muggeridge entitled his reflection on Mother Teresa Something Beautiful for God. Perhaps the force of that expression does not immediately strike us, but consider how curious a statement it is: that here was something—an act, a project, a life—beautiful for God. By far the most curious aspect, and the hardest to see afresh and not as mere formula, is that it was for God; but I leave that to a subsequent essay, with only the saints, here Teresa and Irenaeus, to point toward my sequel. For now note instead that it was something beautiful

Christ’s Presence in the Poor and the Church: A Traditionalist Liberation Theology

This paper argues that central claims about the poor in liberation theology do not displace traditional claims about the centrality of the Church but are a natural outworking of them. Christ is present in the poor first in the sense that Christ is present prior to and as preparation for justification, working to overcome our infirmities; Christ is present second in the sense that the poor are God’s special instrument of salvation. Neither manner of being present relies on the rethinking of nature and grace in the 20th century that is sometimes made foundational to liberation theology, suggesting that at least some of its central claims could survive translation to other conceptions

The Darkling Lights of Lucifer: Annihilation, Tradition, and Hell

Gregory of Nyssa is famous for defending both the doctrine of epektasis, the continual ascent of the blessed toward God, and, in places, the doctrine of apokatastasis, the eventual restoration to God of all creation, including the Devil. This is a curious conjunction, for while Gregory connects them more than adventitiously, the tradition of the Eastern Church has largely received the former and rejected the latter.1 The point of this essay is to follow that intuition, not to say inspiration, of the tradition: briefly to challenge Gregory\u27s conjunction and to develop from that challenge and with certain currents in philosophy of religion a conception of hell that is consistent with epektasis, avoids the implications of apokatastasis, and is itself attractive—which is to say, appropriately repulsive

Is Liberalism the Problem? Review of Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

A specter is haunting conservatism — the specter, indeed, of Marx. Those conservatives too young to remember the Cold War are increasingly suspicious of the economic and political prescriptions of the older anticommunism: capitalism as opposed to socialism; individual rights as opposed to collectivism. If they are not sure of Marx’s solutions, they at least share with him a sense of the problems, especially the meaninglessness and atomization of our social order. The alternative right is an alternative to precisely this fading consensus, wagering that race and nation have survived the ravages of liberal capitalism and can be a home again. But they in their own way are only the dark creatures of a broad, Enlightenment liberalism, their whiteness forged in the colonial encounter rather more than in the premodern past. Religious conservatives, in turn, have flitted from the supernatural constitutionalism of the older Christian right, in which America is God’s chosen nation, to an emphasis on natural law, in which our shared sense of right and wrong, of what marriage is and isn’t, can ground a common politics, to finally an unsettled flirtation with premodern forms of Christian polity, in which church and state should be distinct but integrally related in some way. What was solid is melting into air

God and the Gaps

Excerpt: Most often the story is told like this: There is some feature of the world that science is at a loss to explain. Christians rush to claim that this feature can only be explained by God. Science later produces probable non-theistic hypotheses, and the Christians must beat a hasty retreat. In the early nineteenth century, the feature was the complexity of life, the scientific explanation Darwinian evolution

Detecting Life-bearing Extra-solar Planets with Space Telescopes

One of the promising methods to search for life on extra-solar planets (exoplanets) is to detect life's signatures in their atmospheres. Spectra of exoplanet atmospheres at the modest resolution needed to search for oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, and methane will demand large collecting areas and large diameters to capture and isolate the light from planets in the habitable zones around the stars. For telescopes using coronagraphs to isolate the light from the planet, each doubling of telescope diameter will increase the available sample of stars by an order of magnitude, indicating a high scientific return if the technical difficulties of constructing very large space telescopes can be overcome. For telescopes detecting atmospheric signatures of transiting planets, the sample size increases only linearly with diameter, and the available samples are probably too small to guarantee detection of life-bearing planets. Using samples of nearby stars suitable for exoplanet searches, this paper shows that the demands of searching for life with either technique will require large telescopes, with diameters of order 10m or larger in space.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Ap.

The topology of deformation spaces of Kleinian groups

Let M be a compact, hyperbolizable 3-manifold with nonempty incompressible boundary and let AH(\pi_1(M)) denote the space of (conjugacy classes of) discrete faithful representations of \pi_1(M) into PSL 2 (C). The components of the interior MP(\pi_1(M)) of AH(\pi_1(M)) (as a subset of the appropriate representation variety) are enumerated by the space A(M) of marked homeomorphism types of oriented, compact, irreducible 3-manifolds homotopy equivalent to M. In this paper, we give a topological enumeration of the components of the closure of MP(\pi_1(M)) and hence a conjectural topological enumeration of the components of AH(\pi_1(M)). We do so by characterizing exactly which changes of marked homeomorphism type can occur in the algebraic limit of a sequence of isomorphic freely indecomposable Kleinian groups. We use this enumeration to exhibit manifolds M for which AH(\pi_1(M)) has infinitely many components.Comment: 49 pages, published versio

A conditional morphological (fluffy) mutant of A. nidulans.

A conditional morphological (fluffy) mutant of A. nidulans