by Justin Carmien
There is a peculiar moral reflex I often encounter at precisely the moments when something meaningful might occur—a move too-quickly towards reconciliation. What first appears as divergence is soon drawn into a movement of apology or clarification.
by Tom Amarque
In reality, this conflict and the political polarization is better understood as an internal schism within the long secular afterlife of Christianity itself. (Post-)Modern political conflict does not take place outside the Christian moral-metaphysical inheritance but unfolds within it. Even where explicit belief in God has waned, the underlying grammar continues to structure political imagination and affective intensity. The culture war is therefore not post-Christian; it is a theological civil war conducted with secular concepts and alien-like technology.
by Justin Carmien
Thirty-five years ago, a conflict raged between religion and science. The public display was especially pronounced in conversations surrounding figures such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.
by Justin Carmien
I fear that something adult has quietly gone missing from my social experience. I’m not so much worried about a loss of discipline among my friends and colleagues—certainly not authority, nor responsibility—but about something which precludes such virtues and makes them possible.
by Justin Carmien
There is a particular jingle which still hums through grocery stores and banks, a faint residue of another world. “Everybody wants to be closer to free.”
by Justin Carmien
Five Easy Pieces tells the story of a man drifting between the worlds he inhabits. Jack Nicholson’s character, Bobby Dupea, is caught between expectations, family, and his own sense of self—a narrative of dislocation and rootlessness.
by Tom Amarque
My most recent article, “The Art of Willing,” proved interesting largely because of the feedback it generated. In retrospect, it became obvious that I had failed to answer the most fundamental question of all—namely: What is will? I realized that much of the criticism stemmed from this omission. I had committed one of philosophy’s cardinal sins: assuming that everyone uses a given term in the same way I do. So let’s rectify this.
by Tom Amarque
When Albert Camus wrote The Stranger in 1942—a work that contributed to his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957—World War II was at its zenith. Paris was still occupied by the Germanz. Tens of thousands of soldiers died in Stalingrad that same summer. If there had ever been a time of Kairos, of massive cultural upheaval and death, it was right then.