Tag Archives: enlightenment ideals

Neither Athens nor Jerusalem

In 1867 Matthew Arnold wrote a book titled Culture and Anarchy in which he held up two saving springs of our civilization: Athens – from which we get the inner urge to “see things as they really are” – and … Continue reading

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Wickedness and Suffering

Wickedness and Suffering Does that heading about cover it?  Eugene Ionesco, the brilliant Franco-Romanian playwright, wrote Tueur sans gages [Killer without wages], a play that opens with his characters marveling over the great neighborhood to which they feel fortunate to … Continue reading

Posted in Absolute Freedom and Terror, absurdism, academe, action, afterlife, alienation, American politics, anthropology, art, art of living, atheism, autonomy, beauty, Biblical God, book reviews, books, bureaucracy, Christianity, cities, class, conformism, contemplation, contradictions, cool, courage, cultural politics, culture, desire, dialectic, erotic life, ethics, evil, existentialism, exploitation, faith, fashion, freedom, friendship, gender balance, glitterati, Gnosticism, guilt and innocence, health, hegemony, heroes, hidden God, hierarchy, history, history of ideas, idealism, ideality, identity, ideology, idolatry, immorality, institutional power, Jews, journalism, Judaism, legal responsibility, life and death struggle, literature, love, male power, memoir, memory, Messianic Age, mind control, moral action, moral evaluation, moral psychology, morality, mortality, motherhood, ontology, oppression, pacifism, past and future, peace, philosophy, poetry, political movements, politics of ideas, postmodernism, power, presence, promissory notes, propaganda, public facade, public intellectual, radicalism, reductionism, relationships, religion, roles, romantic love, secular, seduction, self-deception, social construction, social conventions, social ranking, spiritual journey, spiritual not religious, spirituality, status, status of women, suffering, terror, terrorism, the examined life, the problematic of men, the problematic of woman, the profane, the sacred, theism, theology, time, twentieth century, twenty-first century, Utopia, victimhood, victims, violence, war, work, writing, Zeitgeist | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment