Category Archives: Literature

Santa Claus: Myth or Lie?

Posted on December 24, 2011 by

At The Secular Outpost, Jeffery Jay Lowder has a brief blog piece about Tom Flynn, the Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism, and some of the reasons Flynn puts forth about why parents should not tell their children … Continue reading →

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Evidence, Beliefs, and ‘Wise Blood’

Posted on November 30, 2011 by

In a previous essay, it was noted that the most objective, the most invariant-across-contexts feature of evidence is that evidence fits with a story. To regard evidence as that which fits with (and, thereby, supports) a story is not to … Continue reading →

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The Left

Posted on July 4, 2011 by

Sometimes, some remarks should be cherished by themselves and for themselves, for their insight, for their truth. Here is one such passage from Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear by Javier Marías: The Left has always been a manner of … Continue reading →

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About Evil, Part 4

Posted on January 4, 2011 by

The previous installment in this ‘About Evil’ series noted how Maximilien Aue, the narrator of Littell’s The Kindly Ones, managed to deny that Untersturmführer Döll was properly to be regarded as evil, despite his participation in exterminations as a guard … Continue reading →

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About Evil, Part 3

Posted on November 30, 2010 by

The previous installment in this series introduced the person of Ikonnikov from Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and contrasted his character with that of Untersturmführer Döll in Littell’s The Kindly Ones. Both men are interesting in themselves, but Döll is … Continue reading →

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About Evil, Part 2

Posted on November 9, 2010 by

(continued from here) In Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, it is repeatedly, variously, and insistently noted how no person is of his own making, since each person finds himself in contexts, in situations which are forced upon him and which … Continue reading →

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About Evil, Part 1

Posted on November 5, 2010 by

In Jonathan Littell’s controversial and award winning novel, The Kindly Ones (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), Maximilien Aue, the main character who had been a Nazi officer during World War II, asserts that the Nazi systematic mass slaughters of such non-combatants … Continue reading →

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Cormac McCarthy and free will

Posted on October 22, 2010 by

In this entry I discuss the work of Cormac McCarthy and the degree to which it is concerned with the freedom of the will. My claim, such as it is, is that some of his works contain an extended examination … Continue reading →

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