http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:44:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en What is religion for Bataille? Most fundamental to his thought is his theory of world economics, of the play and movement of energy in its excesses and productions. What is most valuable or might be said to be his morality? I have been exploring a few of his writings for ... http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/03/is-batailles-religion-paradoxical/ Congratulations to contributor Daniel Den Boer (who blogs on his own as well at To A More Dangerous Conversation), for his acceptance to Duke Divinity School! http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/03/congratulations/ Something exciting is happening in the Supreme Court. Long story short,  certain groups of Christians have been picketing funerals for dead soldiers. America deserves it, they say, for their tolerance of homosexuality. Divine punishment, they say. "Thank God for dead soldiers," they say... A father in Maine is appealing to the ... http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/03/thank-god-for-dead-soldiers/ Francis Schaeffer is one of the giants of 20th century evangelicalism.  He founded the L’Abri Fellowship and helped to forge the alliance between American Christianity and political conservatism. Frank Schaeffer, his son, is another story. Frank began his career working for his father, but lived to turn on the movement Francis had ... http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/03/frank-schaeffer-and-christian-freedom/ As I find the time over the next few days, I will be posting a summary of and engagement with Bataille's Theory of Religion. I discovered this text during an independent study of theories about desire in the 20th century [note: same one Matt's been posting such delicious little essays ... http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/03/batailles-theory-of-religion-1-immanence/ In connection to my current study on desire, my interests have spread into the philosophies concerning food, humor, and horror. Thus far, I have only had time to do a moderate amount of reading on food, a nearly worthless bit on humor, and a more serious amount on desire in ... http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/03/the-desire-in-horror/ While I drove from student teaching to Echo Park en route to Downtown where I pick up my wife from work, I thought through a thread that connects Wendell Berry to Niebuhr and them to contemporary social science.  The thread is fragility. An advertiser wrote on a description for a new collection ... http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/03/action-passion-faith-and-history/ Literary theorist Stanley Fish has a fun read,  "Is There a Text in this Class?" Do read it, but for the sake of the post, here is my own summary: Language is situational. You cannot separate a statement's meaning from its situation. Thus, meta-truths=asituational truths=useless to people (for they are constantly ... http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/02/fish-language-and-worldview/ In his Confessions, St. Augustine uses language as an interesting analogy for the totality of creation when grounded in the Creator. In Book IV, Augustine laments the wild years of his young adult life, regretting the value he placed in the sensual world as determined by “the flesh.” Although one may ... http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/02/saint-augustine-and-a-language-analogy/ What does Hegel mean by Desire? Most simply, Hegel says that “desire is self-consciousness,” but the natural question in following that is: what is self-consciousness? Or, for that matter, what is consciousness? I have not read enough Hegel to claim anything more than the most amateur level of expertise on ... http://www.theveilaway.com/commentary/2010/02/desire-and-the-subjectobject-distinction/