Most of us do not spend large parts of our lives on boats, but in cars. We cannot, thus, easily generate the kinds of metaphors that must have come naturally to writers from the late 19th and especially early 20th centuries, who would have traveled by boat primarily, and for whom boat and water metaphors would have been the most natural for communicating concepts of motion-against-stability. Today, I suppose, we do not attempt to say anything about motion as it is experienced in cars, or attempt to capture, in a text, the sense of the rushing past of the world on a highway — if anything, we simply show it on film.
Books
Recent and Older Acquisitions on Origen of Alexandria
A few words about some recent acquisitions on one particular pre-Nicene Church figure, Origen of Alexandria, and some older acquisitions regarding the same that have been sitting on my shelf.
MacIntyre — Secularization and Moral Change, Some Concluding Thoughts
The previous post summarized the outlines of the course of the arguments made by Alasdair MacIntyre in the first, the second, and the third parts of his Secularization and Moral Change. As with the posts summarizing the individual sections, here I must reiterate that Peter Webster has what is probably the best summary of the book out there. I have offered a set of excerpts from A. V. Demant’s review. I also have asked whether the pre-modern world was the unified moral community that MacIntyre suggests it is.
Outlines and summary completed, a somewhat haphazard collection of my reflections/thoughts on Secularization and Moral Change follows below.
MacIntyre, Demant, and the Book of Sirach
Here I offer a question about whether MacIntyre’s framework in Secularization and Moral Change (we first reviewed part one, then part two, and finally part three, as well as summarizing the three parts) is entirely consistent with the evidence of previous ages regarding the novelty, within the modern period, of heterogeneous classes generating the loss of a sense of a shared moral community (and, thus, generating the loss of a shared religious community, culturally and sociologically).
I will not presume to answer this question, but I will offer material that will, I hope, allow one to ask it reasonably.
Alasdair MacIntyre — Secularization and Moral Change, Selections from Demant’s Review
V. A. Demant wrote a review of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Secularization and Moral Change which I list chunks of here, from the April 1968 issue of The Journal of Theological Studies.
Into the Clarities 