Rein on religion

Christian Moderns:

After purification

posted by Philip Gorski

Keane is of course well aware of ... the incompleteness of his account.  But he seems less aware of the crucial blind-spot: the existence and persistence of competing semiotic ideologies and rival visions of moral agency within the Euro-American tradition.  For MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Elshtain, Milbank and Taylor critique modern liberal secularism not from without, but from within, by drawing variously on Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.  Amongst many other things, they argue that moral agency is necessarily embodied via the cultivation of virtue; that tradition is not the opposite of rationality; and that worldly sovereignty must not be monopolized by the secular state.  In other words, they dispute the central tropes of modern, liberal secularism.  Keane, by contrast, eschews critique of this sort, preferring instead to raise the semiotic ideology of Euro-American culture to greater self-consciousness. To that degree, however, he remains a captive to the very ideology he wishes to critique, since increased self-consciousness as an end in itself is, after all, one of the governing tropes of moral agency in the West.

Dr Jon Henderson said: "This site is unique in that we have almost the complete town plan, the main streets and domestic buildings, courtyards, rock-cut tombs and what appear to be religious buildings, clearly visible on the seabed. Equally as a harbour settlement, the study of the archaeological material we have recovered will be extremely important in terms of revealing how maritime trade was conducted and managed in the Bronze Age."

Possibly one of the most important discoveries has been the identification of what could be a megaron — a large rectangular great hall — from the Early Bronze Age period. They have also found over 150 metres of new buildings including what could be the first example of a pillar crypt ever discovered on the Greek mainland. Two new stone built cist graves were also discovered alongside what appears to be a Middle Bronze Age pithos burial.

Mr Spondylis said: "It is a rare find and it is significant because as a submerged site it was never re-occupied and therefore represents a frozen moment of the past."

Thank you to my student Molly.

I've got one comment for Mark Silk: "professorial thumb-sucking"? Excuse me?

I feel like this Twitter post says something about conservative Christianity, but I can't quite figure out what.