On Wolterstorff’s “Justice” @ Immanent Frame

The Immanent Frame is staging an interdisciplinary symposium on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s magnum opus, Justice: Rights and Wrongs–in part, no doubt, because Wolterstorff argues that there can be no sufficient secular grounding of rights. I’ll be contributing several posts to the symposium. The first–“The Paucity of Secularism?”–is online today. The next couple will appear throughout this…

OK, You’re Offended. And…?

As yet another sign that I’m getting old, crotchety, and increasingly conservative, I resonated with Mark Bauerlein’s reflections on David Horowitz’s recent visit to Emory. Horowitz is an itinerant conservative provocateur who just loves to raise the hackles of soppy liberals. But Bauerlein’s observations resonate with what I’ve seen, too: Most of them [attendees] were…

The End of (Poetic) Greatness?

When Stanley Hauerwas was told that Time magazine, in 2001, had chosen him as “America’s best theologian,” he quickly retorted: “‘Best’ is not a theological category.” That ‘category’ discomfiture came to mind as I was reading David Orr’s provocative piece, “The Great(ness) Game,” in this weekend NYTBR. Orr raises the carrot that teases the aspiring…

John Updike, RIP

I could only respond in a gasp of surprise upon seeing the news of John Updike’s death. He was, without question, one of America’s great “men of letters,” if you’ll forgive the cliche. I appreciated his fiction and stories (I notice one of my earliest blog posts was on Updike’s Early Stories), some his poetry,…