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 [...]
Tag Archives: criticism
Karen Armstrong’s History of God.
23-Oct-08When 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 [...]
Apologia Pro Carolo Gustavo Jung.
08-Jan-13There 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 never once quotes a single line from the voluminous works of [...]