The biggest problem with teleological history is that it leads to sloppy thinking. It causes the historian to torture the facts as he has them so that they will fit into the Procrustean bed of the March of History that he is thinking of. From the WWII until very recently, the story of anti-Semitism was […]

When the irreligious attempt to understand the religious, they usually get it wrong. For example, in 2002, Mother Jones wrote an article about a movement of Evangelical Christians with the sinister goal of “wiping out Islam”. My spot reaction to the sensationalist headline was, “Well, of course that’s their goal. It is also the goal […]

In the early fifth century, the neo-Platonist Macrobius wrote a commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio. Oddly enough, this commentary wound up taking on a life of its own, and, whereas the Somnium Scipionis survives only in a single palimpsest, the commentary survives in thirty five manuscripts. The commentary is something of a philosophical miscellany, […]

It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist. …Further, it […]

Decades ago, academics in the humanities refered to Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell wrote of a “monomyth” underlying the world’s mythology. Levi-Strauss (no, not the pants maker) advanced the notion of structuralism, i.e. that certain key structures underly all cultures, into the domain of cultural anthropology. Though a lot of this came from Freud and […]

It is a given that any term used to describe those whose cognitive ability falls below the norm will, no matter what the original intent of the apellation, eventually be turned into an term of abuse by schoolyard children. In the late nineteenth and early 20th century, children whose learning progress lagged behind that of […]

Howdy all. First off, I am quite flattered that I have been offered the privelege of posting here on Gene Expression while my own blog is down. That having been said I’m a grad student working towards an M.A. in Medieval Studies, and I should probably be studying for my Latin exam right now. Here, […]