"Soft" Atheism

"The past decade has seen some trenchant attacks on religion, and I agree with many points made by people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. But these atheists have been rightly criticized for treating all religions as if they were collections of doctrines, to be understood in quite literal ways, and for not attending to episodes in which the world’s religions have sometimes sustained the unfortunate and campaigned for the downtrodden. The “soft atheism” I defend considers religion more extensively, sympathizes with the idea that secularists can learn from religious practices and recommends sometimes making common cause with religious movements for social justice. There’s a version of religion, “refined religion,” that is untouched by the new atheists’ criticisms, and that even survives my argument that religious doctrines are incredible. Refined religion sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. That commitment is typically embedded in social movements — the faithful come together to engage in rites, to explore ideas and ideals with one another and to work cooperatively for ameliorating the conditions of human life. The doctrines they affirm and the rituals they practice are justified insofar as they support and deepen and extend the values to which they are committed. But the doctrines are interpreted nonliterally, seen as apt metaphors or parables for informing our understanding of ourselves and our world and for seeing how we might improve both. To say that God made a covenant with Abraham doesn’t mean that, long ago, some very impressive figure with a white beard negotiated a bargain with a Mesopotamian pastoralist. It is rather to commit yourself to advancing what is most deeply and ultimately valuable, as the story says Abraham did."

Philip Kitcher, 

professor of philosophy at Columbia University 

and the author of the forthcoming book 

“Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism.”

It Stays With You

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Ernest Hemingway

Arc de Triomphe

It was in the sixties when I headed for Paris for the first time. It took me just one long day to hitchhike from provincial Munich to the dazzling French metropolis. I found a cheap room in a run down bed & breakfast at the Quartier Latin, and I lived from Brie and Vin Rouge and the air of Paris. On the first morning I opened the window and looked down on a bistro on the corner of a little plaza where four lanes crossed. I smelled fresh croissants and gasoline, heard voices shouting and cars honking. I fell in love with Paris. It means a lot to me to see my name now on an advertising pillow at the Champs Élysées.

A Steel Guitar And A Fragile Voice

Dylan Covers Sinatra

On Wednesday, Mr. Dylan’s website, bobdylan.com, posted what appears to be the cover of the singer’s forthcoming album, “Shadows in the Night,” as well as a single track – a gently sung cover of “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” in an ensemble dominated by a country-tinged steel guitar part. The song, written in 1945 by Buddy Kaye and Ted Mossman, is based on a theme from the third movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and was a hit for Frank Sinatra in 1946. Maybe Dylan's next album will be a collection of American Songbook standards, like recent albums by Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart. Like everything about Bob Dylan - it's enigmatic.

Legacy

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

Ray Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451"

A Country Singer's Legacy

Willie Nelson donated a major part of his personal collection to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin. The donation includes posters, platinum records, signed books, screenplays and posters, and letters and photographs from figures like Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, Bill Clinton and Ann Richards. The collection will be opened to scholars after processing.

Poison For Writers

"A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons."

Philip Roth

Philip Roth At Home

Stoner

In today's New York Times Magazine Steve Almond is raving over a book that was written almost 50 years ago but whose time seems to have come right now. I confess that I had never heard of Stoner or its author, John Williams, before, but I also have never read such an enthusiastic review. According to Mr. Almond the novel tells the life of a hapless university professor of medieval history who struggles to understand who he is. "To read the book today is to recognize how shallow our conception of the heroic has become. Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition. We might be willing to watch a drama about a meek high-school science teacher, but only if he degenerates into a homicidal meth tycoon. Heck, even our literary memoirs have to tell a “larger than life” story to find a wide audience… Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater. And this is what the rest of us are up to, as well. Consider the growth industries in our tech sector: social-media companies like Facebook and Twitter, look-at-me apps like Instagram and Snapchat, content-sharing websites like YouTube and Pinterest that serve as founts of personal marketing. If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display. Otherwise, you wind up like poor Stoner: a footnote in the great human story. But aren’t nearly all of us footnotes in the end? Don’t the dreams we harbor eventually give way to the actuality of our lives? As a fictional hero, William Stoner will have to dwell in obscurity forever. But that, too, is our destiny. Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves. What makes “Stoner” such a radical work of art is that it portrays this confrontation not as a tragedy, but the essential source of our redemption... He suffers no delusions about his place in the world. He recognizes that others find him absurd and that his intellectual contributions to his arcane field are at best minor. Over and over again, Stoner is forced to confront his own weakness, his limitations as a son and father and husband and scholar. And yet he refuses to turn away." Steve Almond, by the way, is not the only fan of Stoner. Tom Hanks said in an interview: "It’s simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But it’s one of the most fascinating things that you’ve ever come across." Needless to say that I ordered the book today.