The End of Materialism

Peter Leithart provides a provocative summary of James Le Fanu's Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves over on his blog. Turns out science may not have the answers to all of life's persistent questions.

Agnes has discovered my business plan

Marriage, Morality, and Culture

R.R. Reno has a thoughtful reflection on "Marriage, Morality, and Culture" over at the First Things website. Read the whole thing, and be inspired to do so by his concluding paragraphs:

It is sociologically incoherent to imagine that we can both radically redefine marriage and transfer its “transcendent, cultural, and social significance” to same-sex couples, as if the former does not alter and undermine the later.

We cannot make culture serve our desires—or our ideals for that matter. We cannot turn traditional modes of moral discipline such as marriage into a ready resource for conferring feelings of normalcy or equality. To consciously modify the moral norms of moral institutions such as marriage turns them into something else: existential decoration, imaginary seriousness, or an engineered garment of meaning that cannot help but feel plastic and artificial. A bespoke “transcendent, cultural, and social significance” is ephemeral and short lived.

First thoughts on "Gilead"

Along with the last Batman story ever, I got Gilead for my birthday this year (Ma and Pa Curmudgeon were trying to whittle down my Amazon wish list). I know I'm well behind the curve in reading it, but here I am nonetheless. A few dozen pages in, I very much like it, primarily because the narrator is a pastor who, after many years during which he was perhaps as crabby as I tend to be, is notably content.

It gives me hope.

Don't read "The Road"

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is compelling and transforming. His work may be what Norman Mailer had in mind when he said, "The purpose of a great novel, however, is not to cater to one’s passing needs, but to enter one’s life; even alter it" (at the National Book Awards in 2005; although The Road wasn't published until 2006, so maybe Mailer was thinking of All the Pretty Horses). I continue to wrestle with this prolonged meditation on the requirements of fatherhood.

I should say as well that the book ends, remarkably enough, on a note of hope. But to get there, you have to slog through page after page of unrelenting, unremitting horror, with more scenes than I can count which you will wish you had never read so that those images wouldn't be seared into your head. I'm glad I did, but I can't recommend you do.