Category: Read Me Project
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Thoughts on *Sustaining Democracy*
If we had to say what “democracy” means, could we? Would we come up with the definition “self-government by political equals”? I liked that definition, and I’m not sure I would have come up with it on my own. The “government of the people by the people for the people,” yes. But the “political equals”…
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Thoughts on “Four Gospels, One Jesus?”
Finally got around to posting these thoughts on a good book about the gospels …
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Thoughts on the End of White Christian America
Does “the end of white Christian America” explain as much as some people think it does? …
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Just Because You’re Cynical Doesn’t Mean People Aren’t Self-Interested
What does it mean that I disagree with this book enough to laugh out loud and spill my coffee? …
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The State of the “Read Me” Project, 2022
T’shua li!! Victory is mine!! In 2021, I at last achieved the dynamic homeostasis I tossed out as a goal so cavalierly a few years ago with respect to my “Read Me” Shelf. More precisely, with respect to the amorphous multi-locational stack of unread books that is a more or less permanent part of the…
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Christmas Books
It wouldn’t really be Christmas without books. Christmas was a much lower key event this year for our family than it has been in years past. This turned out to be delightful. Nevertheless, we did all exchange bookstore gift cards, because that’s the kind of family we are. And we did make the obligatory Christmas…
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Reinventing the Radical Proposition that Women are People
I keep being astonished at how quickly the recent past becomes ancient history, and how that impels the reinvention of the same wheels, over and over, generation after generation. I’m a slower learner than I think, I guess. Because feminism is old. Anne Hutchinson old. Married Women’s Property Acts old. Votes for Women old. International…
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Assumptions, Questioned and Un-
What counts as knowledge – that is, knowledge of reality? This is a question for the philosophers, in the end; but, as Gramsci said, everyone is a philosopher, so it’s a question for all of us. And while Gramsci’s point was that everyone has a philosophy, one they live by, some philosophers are better than…
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Maybe Metaphysics After All
Almost no one operates without some metaphysical paradigm, if indeed anyone does. Being a modernist-postmodernist kind of thinker, I have gone along for decades assuming that whatever those metaphysical premises are, they are simply unprovable. At some point, a person just has to decide what she’s going to accept. That view traces back to Kant,…
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Thoughts on *A Book of Uncommon Prayer* by Brian Doyle
I wish everyone could read this book. I understand that not everyone would think they would want to, for different reasons. But I wish it, anyway, because it is a beautiful book that has the effect of opening a reader’s (my) eyes to the delightful, marvelous, wondrous, good, true, vital things, ordinary things, that surround…
Matters of Interpretation 