Today I conclude my little series on Saul Bellow at The Twelve blog: “The Temptations of Assimilation: Schilder our Bellow?” Here’s where I end up: “Being Reformed” is too regularly the banner under which we enthusiastically assimilate to the age. “Being Reformed” is the warrant and rationale for our cultural engagement to the point that…
As I’m working through Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, I can’t help but compare it to two other important books I’ve read in the last year or so: David Brooks’ much-discussed The Social Animal and Iain McGilchrist’s underappreciated The Master and his Emmisary. Of course they are quite different projects, working with different lexicons,…
One of the highlights of 2011 for me was making the acquaintance of Gabe Lyons and all the good folks associated with Q: Ideas for the Common Good. The conversation has connected me with a wide network of leaders and innovators from various arenas of cultural production (politics, media, the arts, finance and commerce, education,…
Right here above my desk at home is a section of books by Christopher Hitchens, close at hand since they often repay revisiting. The titles will seem eclectic, but in fact there is a tight logic that threads them together: books on Thomas Paine and Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger and Thomas Jefferson, the Clintons and…
Ruth Abbey’s review of a new little book by Charles Taylor and Jocelyn Maclure (Secularism and Freedom of Conscience) opens with an interesting observation: Readers hoping for a condensed version of Taylor’s 2007 tome, A Secular Age, will not find it here. I find that intriguing precisely because I think I’m writing that hoped-for book!…
For those in the West Michigan area, just FYI: