christianity | Wright's Writing

Old notes on "the foundations of Christianity"

Karl Kautsky’s book Foundations of Christianity: A Study in Christian Origins (1908) is quite good. Despite his flaws and mistakes (both...

The importance of John Brown

[Grad-school notes...] I'm reading about John Brown--David Reynolds' John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the...

Against idealism

[The following thoughts are from this book.] It’s funny that people often deprecate Marxian materialism as an explanation of society and...

The utility of "God"

I attended my first Episcopalian service last night [in April 2010]. It was Maundy Thursday, so we did the whole foot-washing thing and...

An underwhelming encounter with Christians

A misadventure. [Written in 2006.]— At lunch in the campus center I saw a flyer advertising an event tonight having something to do with...

"The West's" derivativeness

I’ve always suspected that people give too much credit to ancient Greeks. They couldn’t have been as divinely original as we’re taught....

Catholicism, an anachronism

In the Piazza of San Marco in Florence is a church in which lies the dried-out corpse of Saint Antonino from the fifteenth century, his...

Two interpretations of love

Max Scheler’s Ressentiment (1912), while dated and silly in some respects, is worth reading. Scheler is a semi-Nietzsche in his...

The making of the working class

I'm finally reading [in 2011] E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Query: why was England so...

A moment of charity to Christianity

Karl Marx once said, “After all, we can forgive Christianity much because it taught us to love children.” Almost unbelievably, the...

Christianity updated

One of the many ironies about contemporary Christians is that they tend to be supportive of capitalism. This isn’t surprising: from the...