http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:36:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Inspired by reader PrajK’s suggestion, I’m going to use my old del.icio.us feed to link to my articles and blog posts while this blog is dormant. Those with RSS readers who wish to keep track of what I’m up to can go ahead and subscribe. http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/11/04/ps/ I suppose it goes without saying after more than two months of inactivity, but this blog is presently dormant and is going to remain that way at least for a while longer. As I indicated elsewhere a couple of weeks ago it was a perfect storm of matters professional (beginning ... http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/11/03/on-hiatus/ (Apologies for the absurdly sparse blogging of late – the beginning of the semester has kept me quite busy since returning from New Jersey. The following are my notes on the fifth chapter of Caritas in Veritate, and I’ll plan to have my final set of notes up some time ... http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/08/29/reading-caritas-in-veritate-notes-on-chapter-five/ “Professor Richard Dawkins has complained of religious beliefs that they offer too simple a picture of reality, one that is too easily understood, whereas, he thinks, we should expect to find reality perplexing and hard to understand. As a criticism of Christian belief, this appears to me wildly wide of ... http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/08/23/a-quote-for-sunday/ From what I can tell, the only thing less conducive to blogging than returning home jet-lagged from a weeklong philosophy-and-beer binge is returning home jet-lagged from a weeklong philosophy-and-beer binge to a two-year-old bedmate who has decided to wake up early and often. (“Papa’s here!” he exclaims at 5:30am the ... http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/08/23/waiting-for-the-fog-to-lift/ by JL Wall Zombiepocalypse is definitely scenario in which I'm more than willing to break out the "overwhelming force": Even so, their analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable. In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit ... http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/08/18/epidemiologists-pre-emptive-wars-necessary-justified-only-hope-in-case-of-zombie-invasion/ by JL Wall Before being informed that Mackey identifies as a Libertarian and (apparently) has not made any donations to Republican candidates and rather snittily walking it back just a little bit, Ben Wyskida at the HuffPo proclaims: The bottom line for me, reading Mackey's op-ed, is that by shopping at Whole ... http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/08/18/another-reason-i-dont-understand-the-logic-behind-boycotting-whole-foods/ by JL Wall I read in The Wall Street Journal about the melancholy of affluence, "Not in all the five millenia of man's recorded history have so many been so affluent."  Minds formed by scarcity are distorted.  The heart can't take this sort of change.  Sometimes it just refuses to accept ... http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/08/17/saul-bellow-on-the-problem-of-modernity/ This coming week I’m going to be in Princeton at a seminar on a recent volume of essays by Elizabeth Anscombe, which means that blogging will be sparse to, well, sparser than sparse from my end. (Though given how it’s been the past few weeks, will anyone notice the difference? ... http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/08/16/on-the-road/ TAC contributing editor Andrew Bacevich, whose article on Afghanistan in the latest issue of Commonweal has generated a fair amount of discussion (some of which I plan to address soon), has an appreciation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American in the Summer 2009 issue of World Affairs Journal: “Innocence,” [Green] writes, ... http://www.amconmag.com/schwenkler/2009/08/14/the-limits-of-good-intentions/