Get Obama elected. I will be interested to see what we can say we did on this date in 20013. But some quick thoughts. I thought the emotional resonance of this wonderful day was captured in the musical performances--Aretha's "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and Yo Yo Ma's exuberant cello. The speech was a sober call to for us all to be grownups and to return to the true thing that make us most deeply ourselves, that we are all in this together, not just narcissists on our own self-absorbed trips. Understated, perhaps in its rhetorical form, but a slap at the guy sitting behind him leaving today for Texas. The American people, I think, are ready to rise to the challenge if a grown-up case for service and sacrifice is made to them, but soon enough we'll all be subjected to the childish antics in the Senate and House. So we'll see how all that works out.
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The rise and fall of the Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary followed by the rise and fall of the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. - Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability
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There is so much to which we must say NO. To what can we say that will be worthy or our YES? - Originality vs. Novelty
What it means to be truly original. - The Coming Discontinuity
The machines win unless... - The Meaning of History in 25 Theses
The big picture succinctly summarized. - Reading Charles Taylor's A Secular Age
Long, four part piece that seeks to summarize main themes of Taylor's important 2007 book. - Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism
In the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony: which is to say, open to signs - Subjects and Objects
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Meditation on Steinbeck's 'East of Eden' - Dying Traditions
Living traditions survive in the U.S. only so long as they can resist acculturation into the larger modern American milieu. The economic pressures working to break down such subcultures are terrific.
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