christianity | Wright's Writing

Sep 7, 20207 min read

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...

May 29, 20188 min read

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...

May 28, 20186 min read

Against idealism

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

Jun 23, 20162 min read

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...

Jun 22, 20166 min read

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...

Jun 2, 20163 min read

"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....

May 5, 20162 min read

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...

Jan 4, 20166 min read

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...

Aug 10, 20154 min read

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...

Feb 18, 20152 min read

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...

Feb 15, 20152 min read

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...