My summer-evening, front-porch reading for the past few days has been the Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe, edited by his former agent, Elizabeth Nowell. They are charged with the same frenetic energy as his fiction. And given the range from his youth until just a couple of days before his untimely death, they also function…
On Pentecost Sunday, from my temporary rooms at Trinity College of the University of Toronto, I dispatched the manuscript for a second, revised edition of my first book, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, which will be published by Baker Academic. As I note in the new Preface to the book,…
While it’s a throwaway comment within his new essay, “Life Studies: What I Learned When I Learned to Draw,” I paused for a while over this observation from Adam Gopnik: Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it’s really our relief…
Dipping into Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations yet again, I was reminded of this little barb about philosophy. It’s a typical Wittgensteinian aphorism, koan-like, that has to sink in a bit, particularly since the analogy is an inversion of precisely the sorts of philosophical assumptions Wittgenstein is calling into question: “When we do philosophy we are like…
I’m always glad to see a new short story from George Saunders. This month’s New Yorker features his story, “Home,” as part of their summer fiction issue. The story of a vet trying to re-enter his life after service in Afghanistan or Iraq (we’re never sure which), it is vintage Saunders: uproariously funny in parts,…
I was honored (sorry: “honoured”) to learn that my book, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy, has received the 2011 Word Guild Award in the Academic category. (The Word Guild hosts the annual Canadian Christian Writing Awards.) I was quite surprised since the other finalists in this category–Deborah C. Bowen’s Stories of the…