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Tag Archives: criticism

Bob Dylan, Conscience of a Generation.

05-Nov-15

http://viningsnaturalhealthcentre.co.uk/tag/complementary-therapies/page/11/ A few weeks ago I was cleaning up after a party at my house and came upon a paper bag full of books which a guest had apparently left as a gift.  They were all recent books, the kind of stuff that makes me hate being in bookstores – I always feel like I have […]

Apologia Pro Carolo Gustavo Jung.

08-Jan-13

Budapest II. kerület There are some rules in the intellectual world which are pretty reliable for detecting bloviating stupidity, or blathering solipsism (or however you want to render b.s.), and one of them is this: if someone launches a five-thousand word attack on a noted author, and almost never quotes a line from the voluminous works of that […]

Thomas Merton’s Raids on the Unspeakable.

04-Jul-11

When I tried to read Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain while in college – a book compared (by the publishing trade) with Augustine’s Confessions – I was astounded to find the book self-promoting, egotistical, petty, and posturing, without a single elevated thought or even sentence that could place it with the Confessions.  This is one […]

Karen Armstrong’s History of God.

23-Oct-08

When someone writes a four-hundred page summary of the monotheistic West’s ideas about God, there are a few things a reviewer can’t say. You can’t say that the author left things out; of course, that’s the nature of the project. You can’t say that the treatment of certain things was cursory; of course it will […]