Some timely court testimony from Daniel Burns, of the St. Patrick’s Day Four, charged with trespassing after pouring his blood in a military recruitment center in 2003 before the impending Iraq invasion: “I poured blood carefully. I didn’t throw it or splash it; exaggerations. And it dropped down. And then I saw the flag; I […]
I just picked up a copy of Peter Sloterdijk’s latest English release, a collection of essays entitled Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger. The collection, which was released in German in 2001, is part of a burgeoning translation industry that tries to get English readers up to speed with Sloterdijk’s prolific and ongoing career. The subtitle […]
Paul Virilio, born in 1932, spent his early life on the northern coast of France. His childhood, growing up alongside the Second World War, was marked by routine bombings, as Nantes became a Nazi occupied port. Like many other postmodern theorists, the French experience of the war and subsequent French political problems, like the Algerian […]
I’ve been tracking McLuhan’s relationship to his Catholic faith for the last several weeks, specifically going through The Medium and the Light, a collection of interviews, addresses, outlines, etc. centering on religion. True to form, McLuhan’s thoughts are a mixture of what feel like off-the-cuff statements and long-percolated and crystallized observations. Reading all these documents […]
“To come back to our comparison, the choice between two forms of authority makes me think of the difference between hardware and software. The written or printed paper is hardware; the spoken or recorded word is software. Pontifical documents were hardware, as stable and solid as matter. The new form is software, as malleable as […]
Lately I’ve been reading up on Paul Virilio, French philosopher of technology, who started as a stained-glass artist and now practices as an architect designing public housing for the poor in Paris. A truly model Catholic philosopher. In particular, I’ve been mulling over a church he designed with Claude Parent, dedicated to St. Bernadette in […]
Dean Dettloff 