Archive for the ‘Thinking’ Category

January 22, 2010 1

Historical Perspective in The Study of Anything

By Robert Minto in History, Thinking

Tell me if this is slightly contradictory: experts often refuse to comment on what figures or movements are most important in our present, because “we lack the historical distance” to know their real significance. But experts also often bemoan our anachronism because we fail to enter into the life of the past when considering the [...]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

December 10, 2009 0

A Defense of Rash Exposure

By Robert Minto in Blogging, Prospects, Scholarship, Thinking

Why in the world would I publish something as open to criticism as that last post?
While formulating my own critique of what I had said, I had to ask myself that question. The answer is that I have suddenly become impressed by the idea that the real danger of the kind of education I’m pursuing [...]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

December 9, 2009 1

Theses on Mysticism and Dialectic

By Robert Minto in Epistemology, Learning, Mystery, Thinking, Virtue

(Courtesy of the prompting of Maimonides, Yair Lorberbaum, Karl Barth, and my all-nighter—on whom be no blame for the result.)

Mysticism and dialectic share a willingness to suspend the certainty and comfort of dogmatic pronouncement for better things. Mysticism refuses to degrade the divine by insisting that one apparently mutually exclusive truth disproves another, while dialectic [...]

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

July 14, 2009 2

Prospectus: How Do Faith, Culture, and Theory Intersect?

By Robert Minto in Blogging, Criticism, Faith, Thinking

It’s time I explain the blurb that I use to describe this blog. In this blurb (available in the right hand column, unless you’re reading this in a feed or on facebook) you will find that I describe the content of this blog as having to do with faith, culture, and theory.
Either I totally fail [...]

Tags: , , , , ,

June 28, 2009 0

In Defense of Self-plagiarism

By Robert Minto in Rhetoric, Scholarship, Thinking

I’ve been enjoying a brief Terry Eagleton kick this last week. My first exposure to the fellow.
First, I read Literary Theory: An Introduction: beautifully written, polemically brilliant, wonderfully informative. Then I worked through Walter Benjamin: Toward a Revolutionary Criticism: somewhat hampered by the jargon, but evincing great insight and interesting lines of thought especially in [...]

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,