This paper is a short reflection on the nature of hermeneutics and the strange joy and burden of writing. It focuses on a particular form of hesitancy, telling, and re-telling found in a short video clip featuring Christopher Hitchens.Keywordshermeneutics, writing, Christopher Hitchen

Jardine, David W

English

University of Calgary Journal Hosting

  Corresponding Author:  David W. Jardine Email: jardine@ucalgary.ca Journal of Applied Hermeneutics April 23, 2015 ©The Author(s) 2015    A Failed Attempt to Finish a Thought Left in Mid-Air by Christopher Hitchens       David W Jardine   Abstract  This paper is a short reflection on the nature of hermeneutics and the strange joy and burden of writing. It focuses on a particular form of hesitancy, telling, and re-telling found in a short video clip featuring Christopher Hitchens.   Keywords  Hermeneutics, writing, Christopher Hitchens Banish all dismay Extinguish every sorrow  If I'm lost or I'm forgiven  The birds will still be singing.  from Elvis Costello (1993), “The Birds Will Still be Singing”  It is an odd thing when something you read or hear actually haunts you and bids remembering, repeated thought and writing, especially when that thing is precisely about being haunted, in a certain way, about hesitating and staying one’s actions. It is odd to have an idea, an image, an off-hand comment or a hunch stay with you despite its refusal to cede its secrets.   This is part of the practice of writing. Learning to let stay. It is an urgent patience, a weird joy.   Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Article 2    2 The late Christopher Hitchens is well known enough for me to not pause for long over his work except to say that his adamant critiques of religion (Hitchens, 2007) and other forms of totalitari-anism were complemented by the work of Richard Dawkins (2006) and Hitchens received, quite near his death, The Richard Dawkins Award at the 2011 Texas Free Thought Convention, one of Hitchens' final public appearances. From that appearance:  Christopher Hitchens: Some of you know, I suppose you all know now, that the words of one of my favorite poets Ernest Dowson are quite often with me. Dowson stole them ac-tually from the Roman poet Horace: Non sum qualis eram, “I am not as I was.”  .  .  .  . In the meantime, we have the same job we've always had. There are no final solutions. There is no absolute truth. There is no supreme leader. There is no totalitarian solution that says “If you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would simply aban-don your critical faculties, a world of idiotic bliss can be yours.” You will certainly lose the faculties, and you may not know as a result, that idiotic bliss is even more idiotic than it looks. But we have to begin by repudiating all such claims. Grand Rabbis, Chief Aya-tollahs, infallible Popes, the peddlers of surrogate and mutant quasi-political religion and worship-- the dear leader, the great leader, we have no need of any of this. And looking at them, and their record, and the pathos of their supporters, I realize that it is they who are the grand imposters, and my own imposture this evening was mild by comparison. (God-lessUK, 2013)  The reason I mention the connection to Richard Dawkins in particular is because of what I find to be a still-amazing YouTube video clip of Hitchens and Douglas James Wilson (ObjectiveBob, 2010). Reverend Wilson is the pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and has had many intense and easily accessible public debates and talking-head news encounters with Hitchens. This clip is the final moments of a 2009 documentary Collision: Christopher Hitchens, vs. Douglas Wilson (Documentaryondemand, 2013).    Wilson and Hitchens appear to be in the back seat of a car and Hitchens mentions how those (like himself) arguing against the Divine design of things still take seriously the hairsbreadth of (what he understands to be) happenstance of “the Goldilocks effect,” of the Earth being just right in its relation to the Sun and its sustenance: “you have to spend time thinking about it, working on it. It’s not a trivial [thing]” (ObjectiveBob, 2010).   Hitchens refers to having had a particular conversation with Richard Dawkins. Then this:   Christopher Hitchens: . . . and then at one point. I think this is not on camera, I said, if I could covert every one in the world -- not convert, if I could convince -- to be a non-believer, and I’d really done brilliantly, and there's only one left. One more and then it would be done. There’d be no more religion in the world. No more deism, theism. [Pause]. I wouldn’t do it. [Pause]. And Dawkins said, “What do you mean you wouldn't do it?” I said, “I don’t quite know why I wouldn’t do it.” And it’s not just because there’d be nothing left to argue and no one left to argue with. Not just that. Though it would be that. Somehow, if I could drive it out of the world, I wouldn’t. And the incredulity with Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Article 2    3 which he [Dawkins] looked at me stays with me still. I’ve got to say. (ObjectiveBob, 2010)  As with Dawkins’ look of incredulity, this clip now stays with me.  Thoughts first about the aesthetic “punch” that we often feel when we read or hear something:  The word for perception or sensation in Greek was aesthesis, which means at root a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, “aha,” the “uh” of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, and aesthetic response. (Hillman, 2006, p. 36)  Tersely put, this is the reason for all those drudgery pages in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1989, pp. 42-100) and his attempts to rescue this phenomenon of aesthetic address (p. 299) from its tragic subjectivization and marginalization in our understanding of the experience of truth. This video hits me still, and when I quickly re-created Hitchens’ words for my son over the holidays just passed, all he said was “Yep.”   Me too. I wouldn't do it. And “it would not deserve the interest [I] take in it if it did not have something to teach [me] that [I] could not know by [my]sel[f]” (Gadamer, 1989, p. xxxv).  But at first (and still), I just suspected this might be so, and Hitchens did, too, in a way. He himself remembered and retold this story and told it, as you can see in the video, with the sly grin of suspecting there’s something to it - - a kind of Coyote grin, a bit self-satisfied, a bit expectant, a bit joyous. Were it just a subjective incident with no loft or pitch to it beyond “moist gastric intimacy” (Sartre, 1970, p. 4), re-telling it seems very odd - - sheer self-indulgence and entertainment. On the face of it at least, this is “not just that.”  Why do we re-tell? Trying, perhaps, to work it out or, better, to see if something works out if you work it a bit: “Something awakens our interest" (Gadamer, 2001, p. 50). “Something is going on, (im Spiele ist), something is happening (sich abspielt)" (Gadamer, 1989, p. 104). A clue, then, to Gadamer's (1989, pp. 101-134) deep interest in (what is at) play (Spiel) (and, I guess, in my interest in that Hitchens video).   Something is going on.   I suspect.   So then the risk you run as a writer: maybe not, but only staying put will prove the case for good or ill. Then there is that sort-of hoarder/gatherer/rummager thing that writers do --me, with this clip, saving it, transcribing it, wanting to remember it, telling people about it. There is something here that I need to keep with me, something of the way this idea hangs in the air, somehow, and then, too, of what this hesitation means. Lord knows I’ve tried: Compassion? Sympathy? Extinc-tion? Like saving a rare bird? Knowing that if no one now believes these religious texts they quote, if no one adores these images and ideas, then something is perhaps irretrievably lost? Loss of “the other” as a loss of oneself? Levinas and the horror of facing the last face? Pity? That it Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Article 2    4 would say something too much, too unbearable of me should I proceed? What about the second-last believer?   Bluntly put, yuck to all this.   And hence the irony, that many drafts of writing have been deleted and these deletions seem to have simply increased the glowing attraction of this clip. “[It] compels over and over, and the better one knows it, the more compelling it is. This is not a matter of mastering an area of study” (Gadamer, 2007, p. 115).  This is why, as a writer, I have repeatedly found that it is not just a matter of paying patient attention to the world --to little happenings-by like this clip -- but doing so as if  I will be an-swerable in writing to such things as arrive in (and, I must say, in part because of) such patient attending. That prospect --of being answerable in writing --intensifies attention in a most deli-cious way.   And then comes the odd hermeneutic fidelity of trying to not betray this hovering linger of words and images and appeal and grins, but trying to keep it safe, trying to let it stand in itself, in its own repose.  And then that impossible task, of trying to write so that the linger itself will be a bit legible in what I then write. The task of hermeneutic writing is to not fall for the falsehood that this lingering is an error that writing might fix. It is, rather, a truth that unfixes writing, makes it loft and swerve and exaggerate unpinned. This, of course, is why hermeneutic research is always prone to the writer's indulgences. The aim of writing is not giving myself free rein (Latin indulg-ere) but giving this free rein by finding what of this can be eked out in words: “I wouldn’t do it.”  “What do you mean you wouldn't do it?” I don't know what I mean. Maybe that just attests to the deeply buried hermeneutic assertion, that its work is not about what people or texts or things or signs mean, but about what might happen if they were true. “It is only when the attempt to accept what is said as true fails that we try to “understand" the text . . . as another’s opinion” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 294).   “A text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to truth” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 297).  In remembering, repeating, and caring for this chance little clip, it serves as a sort of sentinel waiting for an arrival that would bespeak its good sense. It is as if this tale itself provides a way to remain alert to the day-to-day events that come and go, as if it is waiting for its own reprieve, waiting to be called for, waiting to be recognized by some kin of the world-- the off-hand event or bit of reading or news story or gesture of a child in a Grade One class, that will summon it, finally, to be what it is. I'm waiting for it to lift off my shoulders in a flight of its own, this sorrow.   Told and retold in almost ritual repetitions, worrying over bones or the great and ancient monas-tic murmuring of texts out loud and under the breath, seeking the truth of what it repeats, seeks its redemption in words. Monkish practices of scholarship.  Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Article 2    5 Telling and re-telling are attempts to let it find its freedom from my own obsessive remembering of it within the confines of a life whose imposture is both too great and too small by itself to think this through.   Writing this aims to free me from it and to free it from me.    “The aim of interpretation, it could be said, is not just another interpretation but human freedom” (Smith, 1999, p. 29).  To face these fleeting things and try to entail them with the right attention, the right affection, with a devotion that is not about deepening the attachments of believing (the first steps towards totalitarian solutions [see Jardine, 2015]) but the wonder that just might turn attachment into love.  The staying of Hitchens’ words in the face the last person to be convinced is the same stay as the pleasure over not quite knowing why.   However, I don’t quite know why.   References  Costello, E. (1993). The birds will still be singing. From E. Costello, The Juliet letters. Warner Brothers CD #45180. Lyrics by E. Costello, copyright Plangent Visions Music Inc.  Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.  Documentaryondemand (2013, April 20). Colisao: Ateu X Pastor [Video file]. (This is a subti-tled version of Collision: Christopher Hitchens, vs. Douglas Wilson. LEVEL4 Studio, Phoenix AZ. Director: Darren Doane, October 27, 2009, ASIN: B002M3SHTO). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JWySEcocc8.  Gadamer, H-G. (1989). Truth and method (2nd rev.ed, J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum Books.  Gadamer, H-G. (2001). Gadamer in conversation: Reflections and commentary (R. Palmer, Ed. & Trans.) New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.  Gadamer, H-G. (2007). From word to concept: The task of hermeneutics as philosophy. In R. Palmer (Ed. & Trans.), The Gadamer reader: A bouquet of the later writings (pp. 108-122). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.  Godless UK (2013, June 30). Christopher Hitchens - Last Public Appearance - Dawkins Award [Video File Dated October 8th 2011]. Retrieved from:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud973COUVYs.  Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Article 2    6 Hillman, J. (2006). Anima Mundi: Returning the soul to the world. In J. Hillman, City and soul (pp. 27-49). Putnam, CT: Spring Publications.  Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great: How religion poisons everything, New York, NY: Twelve Books.  Jardine, D. (2015). An ode to Xmas present. On-line: https://www.academia.edu/10101433/An_Ode_to_Xmas_Present.  ObjectiveBob (2010, July 5). Christopher Hitchens makes a shocking confession [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9TMwfkDwIY.  Sartre, J.P. (1970). Intentionality: A fundamental idea in Husserl's phenomenology. Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology, 1(2), 3-5.  Smith, D.G. (1999). Pedagon: Interdisciplinary essays on pedagogy and culture. New York, NY: Peter Lang.         

A Failed Attempt to Finish a Thought Left in Mid-Air by Christopher Hitchens

This paper is a short reflection on the nature of hermeneutics and the strange joy and burden of writing. It focuses on a particular form of hesitancy, telling, and re-telling found in a short video clip featuring Christopher Hitchens.

Keywords

hermeneutics, writing, Christopher Hitchen

David W Jardine

Directory of Open Access Journals

 
 
Corresponding Author:  
David W. Jardine 
Email: jardine@ucalgary.ca 
Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 
April 23, 2015 
©The Author(s) 2015 
 
 
 
A Failed Attempt to Finish a Thought Left in Mid-Air by 
Christopher Hitchens 
 
 
 
 
 
 
David W Jardine 
 
 
Abstract 
 
This paper is a short reflection on the nature of hermeneutics and the strange joy and burden of 
writing. It focuses on a particular form of hesitancy, telling, and re-telling found in a short video 
clip featuring Christopher Hitchens. 
 
 
Keywords 
 
Hermeneutics, writing, Christopher Hitchens 
Banish all dismay 
Extinguish every sorrow 
 If I'm lost or I'm forgiven 
 The birds will still be singing. 
 from Elvis Costello (1993), “The Birds Will Still be Singing” 
 
It is an odd thing when something you read or hear actually haunts you and bids remembering, 
repeated thought and writing, especially when that thing is precisely about being haunted, in a 
certain way, about hesitating and staying one’s actions. It is odd to have an idea, an image, an 
off-hand comment or a hunch stay with you despite its refusal to cede its secrets. 
  
This is part of the practice of writing. Learning to let stay. It is an urgent patience, a weird joy.  
 
Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Article 2    2 
The late Christopher Hitchens is well known enough for me to not pause for long over his work 
except to say that his adamant critiques of religion (Hitchens, 2007) and other forms of totalitari-
anism were complemented by the work of Richard Dawkins (2006) and Hitchens received, quite 
near his death, The Richard Dawkins Award at the 2011 Texas Free Thought Convention, one of 
Hitchens' final public appearances. From that appearance: 
 
Christopher Hitchens: Some of you know, I suppose you all know now, that the words of 
one of my favorite poets Ernest Dowson are quite often with me. Dowson stole them ac-
tually from the Roman poet Horace: Non sum qualis eram, “I am not as I was.”  
.  .  .  . 
In the meantime, we have the same job we've always had. There are no final solutions. 
There is no absolute truth. There is no supreme leader. There is no totalitarian solution 
that says “If you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would simply aban-
don your critical faculties, a world of idiotic bliss can be yours.” You will certainly lose 
the faculties, and you may not know as a result, that idiotic bliss is even more idiotic than 
it looks. But we have to begin by repudiating all such claims. Grand Rabbis, Chief Aya-
tollahs, infallible Popes, the peddlers of surrogate and mutant quasi-political religion and 
worship-- the dear leader, the great leader, we have no need of any of this. And looking at 
them, and their record, and the pathos of their supporters, I realize that it is they who are 
the grand imposters, and my own imposture this evening was mild by comparison. (God-
lessUK, 2013) 
 
The reason I mention the connection to Richard Dawkins in particular is because of what I find 
to be a still-amazing YouTube video clip of Hitchens and Douglas James Wilson (ObjectiveBob, 
2010). Reverend Wilson is the pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and has had many 
intense and easily accessible public debates and talking-head news encounters with Hitchens. 
This clip is the final moments of a 2009 documentary Collision: Christopher Hitchens, vs. 
Douglas Wilson (Documentaryondemand, 2013).  
  
Wilson and Hitchens appear to be in the back seat of a car and Hitchens mentions how those 
(like himself) arguing against the Divine design of things still take seriously the hairsbreadth of 
(what he understands to be) happenstance of “the Goldilocks effect,” of the Earth being just right 
in its relation to the Sun and its sustenance: “you have to spend time thinking about it, working 
on it. It’s not a trivial [thing]” (ObjectiveBob, 2010).  
 
Hitchens refers to having had a particular conversation with Richard Dawkins. Then this:  
 
Christopher Hitchens: . . . and then at one point. I think this is not on camera, I said, if I 
could covert every one in the world -- not convert, if I could convince -- to be a non-
believer, and I’d really done brilliantly, and there's only one left. One more and then it 
would be done. There’d be no more religion in the world. No more deism, theism. 
[Pause]. I wouldn’t do it. [Pause]. And Dawkins said, “What do you mean you wouldn't 
do it?” I said, “I don’t quite know why I wouldn’t do it.” And it’s not just because there’d 
be nothing left to argue and no one left to argue with. Not just that. Though it would be 
that. Somehow, if I could drive it out of the world, I wouldn’t. And the incredulity with 
Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Article 2    3 
which he [Dawkins] looked at me stays with me still. I’ve got to say. (ObjectiveBob, 
2010) 
 
As with Dawkins’ look of incredulity, this clip now stays with me. 
 
Thoughts first about the aesthetic “punch” that we often feel when we read or hear something: 
 
The word for perception or sensation in Greek was aesthesis, which means at root a 
breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, “aha,” the “uh” of the breath in wonder, 
shock, amazement, and aesthetic response. (Hillman, 2006, p. 36) 
 
Tersely put, this is the reason for all those drudgery pages in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and 
Method (1989, pp. 42-100) and his attempts to rescue this phenomenon of aesthetic address (p. 
299) from its tragic subjectivization and marginalization in our understanding of the experience 
of truth. This video hits me still, and when I quickly re-created Hitchens’ words for my son over 
the holidays just passed, all he said was “Yep.”  
 
Me too. I wouldn't do it. And “it would not deserve the interest [I] take in it if it did not have 
something to teach [me] that [I] could not know by [my]sel[f]” (Gadamer, 1989, p. xxxv). 
 
But at first (and still), I just suspected this might be so, and Hitchens did, too, in a way. He 
himself remembered and retold this story and told it, as you can see in the video, with the sly 
grin of suspecting there’s something to it - - a kind of Coyote grin, a bit self-satisfied, a bit 
expectant, a bit joyous. Were it just a subjective incident with no loft or pitch to it beyond “moist 
gastric intimacy” (Sartre, 1970, p. 4), re-telling it seems very odd - - sheer self-indulgence and 
entertainment. On the face of it at least, this is “not just that.” 
 
Why do we re-tell? Trying, perhaps, to work it out or, better, to see if something works out if you 
work it a bit: “Something awakens our interest" (Gadamer, 2001, p. 50). “Something is going on, 
(im Spiele ist), something is happening (sich abspielt)" (Gadamer, 1989, p. 104). A clue, then, to 
Gadamer's (1989, pp. 101-134) deep interest in (what is at) play (Spiel) (and, I guess, in my 
interest in that Hitchens video).  
 
Something is going on. 
 
 I suspect.  
 
So then the risk you run as a writer: maybe not, but only staying put will prove the case for good 
or ill. Then there is that sort-of hoarder/gatherer/rummager thing that writers do --me, with this 
clip, saving it, transcribing it, wanting to remember it, telling people about it. There is something 
here that I need to keep with me, something of the way this idea hangs in the air, somehow, and 
then, too, of what this hesitation means. Lord knows I’ve tried: Compassion? Sympathy? Extinc-
tion? Like saving a rare bird? Knowing that if no one now believes these religious texts they 
quote, if no one adores these images and ideas, then something is perhaps irretrievably lost? Loss 
of “the other” as a loss of oneself? Levinas and the horror of facing the last face? Pity? That it 
Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Article 2    4 
would say something too much, too unbearable of me should I proceed? What about the second-
last believer? 
 
 Bluntly put, yuck to all this.  
 
And hence the irony, that many drafts of writing have been deleted and these deletions seem to 
have simply increased the glowing attraction of this clip. “[It] compels over and over, and the 
better one knows it, the more compelling it is. This is not a matter of mastering an area of study” 
(Gadamer, 2007, p. 115). 
 
This is why, as a writer, I have repeatedly found that it is not just a matter of paying patient 
attention to the world --to little happenings-by like this clip -- but doing so as if  I will be an-
swerable in writing to such things as arrive in (and, I must say, in part because of) such patient 
attending. That prospect --of being answerable in writing --intensifies attention in a most deli-
cious way.  
 
And then comes the odd hermeneutic fidelity of trying to not betray this hovering linger of words 
and images and appeal and grins, but trying to keep it safe, trying to let it stand in itself, in its 
own repose.  And then that impossible task, of trying to write so that the linger itself will be a bit 
legible in what I then write. The task of hermeneutic writing is to not fall for the falsehood that 
this lingering is an error that writing might fix. It is, rather, a truth that unfixes writing, makes it 
loft and swerve and exaggerate unpinned. This, of course, is why hermeneutic research is always 
prone to the writer's indulgences. The aim of writing is not giving myself free rein (Latin indulg-
ere) but giving this free rein by finding what of this can be eked out in words: “I wouldn’t do it.” 
 
“What do you mean you wouldn't do it?” I don't know what I mean. Maybe that just attests to the 
deeply buried hermeneutic assertion, that its work is not about what people or texts or things or 
signs mean, but about what might happen if they were true. “It is only when the attempt to accept 
what is said as true fails that we try to “understand" the text . . . as another’s opinion” (Gadamer, 
1989, p. 294). 
 
 “A text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to 
truth” (Gadamer, 1989, p. 297). 
 
In remembering, repeating, and caring for this chance little clip, it serves as a sort of sentinel 
waiting for an arrival that would bespeak its good sense. It is as if this tale itself provides a way 
to remain alert to the day-to-day events that come and go, as if it is waiting for its own reprieve, 
waiting to be called for, waiting to be recognized by some kin of the world-- the off-hand event 
or bit of reading or news story or gesture of a child in a Grade One class, that will summon it, 
finally, to be what it is. I'm waiting for it to lift off my shoulders in a flight of its own, this 
sorrow.  
 
Told and retold in almost ritual repetitions, worrying over bones or the great and ancient monas-
tic murmuring of texts out loud and under the breath, seeking the truth of what it repeats, seeks 
its redemption in words. Monkish practices of scholarship. 
 
Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Article 2    5 
Telling and re-telling are attempts to let it find its freedom from my own obsessive remembering 
of it within the confines of a life whose imposture is both too great and too small by itself to 
think this through. 
 
 Writing this aims to free me from it and to free it from me.  
 
 “The aim of interpretation, it could be said, is not just another interpretation but human 
freedom” (Smith, 1999, p. 29). 
 
To face these fleeting things and try to entail them with the right attention, the right affection, 
with a devotion that is not about deepening the attachments of believing (the first steps towards 
totalitarian solutions [see Jardine, 2015]) but the wonder that just might turn attachment into love. 
 
The staying of Hitchens’ words in the face the last person to be convinced is the same stay as the 
pleasure over not quite knowing why. 
 
 However, I don’t quite know why. 
 
 
References 
 
Costello, E. (1993). The birds will still be singing. From E. Costello, The Juliet letters. Warner 
Brothers CD #45180. Lyrics by E. Costello, copyright Plangent Visions Music Inc. 
 
Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. 
 
Documentaryondemand (2013, April 20). Colisao: Ateu X Pastor [Video file]. (This is a subti-
tled version of Collision: Christopher Hitchens, vs. Douglas Wilson. LEVEL4 Studio, Phoenix 
AZ. Director: Darren Doane, October 27, 2009, ASIN: B002M3SHTO). Retrieved from 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JWySEcocc8. 
 
Gadamer, H-G. (1989). Truth and method (2nd rev.ed, J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall, Trans.). 
New York, NY: Continuum Books. 
 
Gadamer, H-G. (2001). Gadamer in conversation: Reflections and commentary (R. Palmer, Ed. 
& Trans.) New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 
 
Gadamer, H-G. (2007). From word to concept: The task of hermeneutics as philosophy. In R. 
Palmer (Ed. & Trans.), The Gadamer reader: A bouquet of the later writings (pp. 108-122). 
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 
 
Godless UK (2013, June 30). Christopher Hitchens - Last Public Appearance - Dawkins Award 
[Video File Dated October 8th 2011]. Retrieved from:  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud973COUVYs. 
 
Jardine  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Article 2    6 
Hillman, J. (2006). Anima Mundi: Returning the soul to the world. In J. Hillman, City and soul 
(pp. 27-49). Putnam, CT: Spring Publications. 
 
Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great: How religion poisons everything, New York, NY: Twelve 
Books. 
 
Jardine, D. (2015). An ode to Xmas present. On-line: 
https://www.academia.edu/10101433/An_Ode_to_Xmas_Present. 
 
ObjectiveBob (2010, July 5). Christopher Hitchens makes a shocking confession [Video file]. 
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9TMwfkDwIY. 
 
Sartre, J.P. (1970). Intentionality: A fundamental idea in Husserl's phenomenology. Journal for 
the British Society for Phenomenology, 1(2), 3-5. 
 
Smith, D.G. (1999). Pedagon: Interdisciplinary essays on pedagogy and culture. New York, 
NY: Peter Lang. 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 


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