State, Violence, and Global Order
Over on the front page, Tim Kowal offers a considered meta-observation of how American power functions in the world: True, America wields a big stick in the world. But it wields it clumsily, taking...
Monthly Archive: March 2012
Let’s Go for a Stroll
The Care Bears as virtue ethicists? Brandon Watson goes there. He’s been on a roll lately, exposing the uselessness of Eric Holder’s ethical support for assassinations, explaining why ethics is public, and, of course,...
A Clarification on Unethical Religiosity
Seems my foray into biblical mythology distracted from my larger objective, which was to draw attention to the paradoxical conflict that can arise between being religious and being ethical–or, to put the conflict in...
When Being Religious Means Being Unethical
This past weekend I listened to the tale from Genesis in which God tests the obedience of Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. It’s easy to brush aside the troubling ethical...
Revelations of Art
Art expresses truth in the same fundamental way as religious ritual and myth do: its truth is the truth of disclosure. Rather than capturing a reality we can weigh and measure or test with...
Echoes on the Road
“Reading is like the execution of a musical score; it marks the realization, the enactment, of the semantic possibilities of a text.” – Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action
Friday Morning Film Reflection: Willow
I saw Willow in the theater when it was released in 1988, and I thought the world of it. On the car ride home, I hummed the musical themes I could remember and tried...
The Bechdel Test, Female Presence in Film, and Buffy’s Abortion
Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency revisits the Bechdel Test, a simple gauge of female presence in film. For a film to pass the test, it must have at least two named female characters who...
