Especially this, which you might have written yourself:
"Her book is a description, often unctuous and syrupy, of her struggle to forgive Rosemary West. In the process, she ropes in as many different kinds of mysticism as she can —both Buddhist, from Tibetan and Chinese to Zen, and Christian, from Saint John of the Cross and Rowan Williams to Quaker. For her, a cloudy benevolence always trumps a hard-edged truth; her views are therefore a potpourri, minestrone, or Mickey Finn of religious—or rather, religiose—ethics; she is that very modern type, spiritual but not religious. One can almost smell the joss sticks and hear, as she writes, the wind chimes tinkling in the background, above the healing chakras of the earth that happen to cross her garden (which is not far from a mountain that she considers holy, as did the ancient Celtic Druids)."
Happy New Year (and don't give up hope Mr. Rational: Obama is just one big fruit loop but only one, there's a bowl full of them and always has been, and people have managed to survive, barely, but still!) ...if watching cable tv is wrong, I'm not sure you want to be right (yep, I just spent part of a day trying to warm up -- after hours outside, standing in frozen mud water, trying to fix a fence in the predawn light -- watching...Ancient Aliens and Finding Bigfoot...I'm kinda missing when it was The Hitler Channel now...and this is what passes for an "intellectual" channel).
After watching this video I started to feel optimistic, figuring that things certainly couldn't get any worse in the new year.
ReplyDeleteBut then I thought of Obama. And I soon realized that things will indeed get worse.
Crack,
ReplyDeleteI thought of you when reading this piece by Theodore Dalrymple: Sentimentalizing Serial Murder.
Especially this, which you might have written yourself:
"Her book is a description, often unctuous and syrupy, of her struggle to forgive Rosemary West. In the process, she ropes in as many different kinds of mysticism as she can —both Buddhist, from Tibetan and Chinese to Zen, and Christian, from Saint John of the Cross and Rowan Williams to Quaker. For her, a cloudy benevolence always trumps a hard-edged truth; her views are therefore a potpourri, minestrone, or Mickey Finn of religious—or rather, religiose—ethics; she is that very modern type, spiritual but not religious. One can almost smell the joss sticks and hear, as she writes, the wind chimes tinkling in the background, above the healing chakras of the earth that happen to cross her garden (which is not far from a mountain that she considers holy, as did the ancient Celtic Druids)."
Oh, and happy New Year!
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year (and don't give up hope Mr. Rational: Obama is just one big fruit loop but only one, there's a bowl full of them and always has been, and people have managed to survive, barely, but still!)
ReplyDelete...if watching cable tv is wrong, I'm not sure you want to be right (yep, I just spent part of a day trying to warm up -- after hours outside, standing in frozen mud water, trying to fix a fence in the predawn light -- watching...Ancient Aliens and Finding Bigfoot...I'm kinda missing when it was The Hitler Channel now...and this is what passes for an "intellectual" channel).
PW