May 2012
3 posts
4 tags
Good God
Catholicism, secularism, and the consolations of superstition
“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure,...
3 tags
7 tags
Go Back Into the Blue
There is something oddly enchanting about Joan Didion. Her prose features the kind of jagged, sharp, spellbinding, poetic, almost Bob Dylan-like sentences that leads some to use words like ‘rough’ to describe its lyrical refrains and labyrinthine twists. It has made her iconic: a literary celebrity, of sorts (assuming one is willing to forgive the oxymoronic feel to such a phrase). While in her...