Martin Hägglund is a professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale. He has written a very interesting book titled This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (buy from that link, and I get #commissions!). This Life caught my attention a while back, but I was not able to get to it because of numerous obligations. I have serious disagreements with the book, but found it helpful in a number of regards. There is a good review of This Life by Nathan Brown here, and another by Samuel Moyn here. I’ve just found another review/exchange, as I post this here, between Hägglund and Robert Pippin — so far (I’ve only dipped into it), it’s great. There are other reviews out there, and some are bad; the ones I linked to above, as I recall, are the better ones that I found.
Augustine of Hippo
Excerpt #25 — Isidore of Seville on Secular Rule and Rulers
A remarkably long excerpt from Isidore of Seville (A.D. 560-636) on Christian kingship, further to flesh-out the nature of one of the objections delivered against Walter Ullmann (by Joseph Canning) — and, perhaps, in the end, to qualify, or even judge, one of these objections.
A Preface to Walter Ullmann, Follow-Up to Part 2(e) of 2 (Oakley, Again)
The first half of our treatment on Ullmann can be found here, and the prelude to this two-part series can be found here (and the forerunner to the prelude [!] is here); in the six-now-seven (a through e; part 2a here, part 2b here, part 2c here, part 2d here, and part 2e1 here) parts of this second post, we’ll cover the way that his students, admirers and critics have presented the outline of his thought, and the faults they have found with it.
A Preface to Walter Ullmann, Part 2(e) of 2 (Oakley)
The first half of our treatment on Ullmann can be found here, and the prelude to this two-part series can be found here (and the forerunner to the prelude [!] is here); in the six (a through e; part 2a here, part 2b here, part 2c here, and part 2d here) parts of this second post, we’ll cover the way that his students, admirers and critics have presented the outline of his thought, and the faults they have found with it.
Texts Written for the Ear, Not for the Eye
In the ancient world, texts are written for the ear, not for the eye. Continue reading
Into the Clarities 