StephenKMackSD's Blog

Is it a surprise that Mr. Ross Douthat begins his New York Times essay of August 3, 2013 titled Return of the Jesus Wars with the titles of American movies as reference points? The Da Vinci Code, The Gospel of Judas, The Passion of Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ, he appeals not to an audience of readers but to movie fans, being a movie reviewer has it’s advantages. The fact that movies rule American lives and thought is a sobering thought. Although he quickly regains his intellectual footing with a mention of the Dead Sea Scrolls,the Gnostic gospels, aided by a reference to the German scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the first intellectual to seek the ‘historical Jesus’, as his posthumously published writing reveals. Recall that he, David Strauss and Albert Sweitzer, prominent German intellectuals, were the leaders of the quest for that historical personage. Continue reading →

Mr. Brooks latest essay at the New York Times titled ‘The Neocon Revival’  is what one always expects from him. A kind of political fiction that reflects a carefully managed set of assertions and quotations, that renders the notion of history as being just out of the reach of the careful reader. Continue reading →

To read Mr. Douthat’s essay of July 27,2013 is to encounter a comic pastiche of a philosophical commentary: on the subject of self-understanding as integral to  self-definition, confining itself to the contemporary American  Republican Party. But Mr. D. cannot resist the very real temptation to indulge in shopworn cliche. He is, after all, a newspaperman facing one of many deadlines. And the comedy begins with his inauspicious title. By all means, read the whole essay for the continuity of his argument, but read in isolation the constituent parts of his essay, as expressing the power of cliche to move that argument into the realm of a kind of philosophical/political comedy. Continue reading →

If the summer, that has just started, has offered you scant amusements, let me offer a suggestion, read David Brooks’ essay titled  The Secular Society .  And experience an intellectual entertainment that demonstrates Mr. Brooks’ ability to trivialize and vulgarize the Book Report to the level of a cartoon, the genre made famous by that kitschmeister Walt Disney.

Perhaps, I was being a bit cynical but for some reason I consulted The Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot edited by Frank Kermode. And re- read ‘from The Idea of a Christian Society’ (1939). The short excerpt of that work that seemed to echo the un-reflective political,religious,moral conformity of Mr. Brooks. In fact thoughtlessness and abject conformity in the whole of life of both writers seems the leitmotif.  The argument, in sum, is that the answer to the conundrums of secularism is the re-invigoration of religious aspect of our communal lives.

Rootless Cosmopolitan

“The Court is eager—hungry—to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case. Standing in the way is an obstacle, a technicality of little interest to anyone but the people of We the People, who created it as a barrier against judges’ intrusion into their lives. They gave judges, in Article III, only the “judicial Power,” a power to decide not abstract questions but real, concrete “Cases” and “Controversies.” Yet the plaintiff and the Gov- ernment agree entirely on what should happen in this lawsuit. They agree that the court below got it right; and they agreed in the court below that the court below that one got it right as well. What, then, are we doing here? Continue reading →

“Coverage today is based on decades-old data and eradicated practices. The formula captures States by reference to literacy tests and low voter registration and turnout in the 1960s and early 1970s. But such tests have been banned nationwide for over 40 years. §6, 84Stat. 315; §102, 89Stat. 400. And voter registration and turnout numbers in the covered States have risen dramatically in the years since. H. R. Rep. No. 109–478, at 12. Racial disparity in those numbers was compelling evidence justifying the preclearance remedy and the coverage formula. See, e.g., Katzenbach, supra, at 313, 329–330. There is no longer such a disparity. Continue reading →