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The Long View

The Long View 2005-11-13: The Shape of Things to Come

This post from 2005 was the first time I became aware of Ross Douthat. Ross has done well for himself as a pundit in the last twelve years, and now works for the New York Times. I've enjoyed his work immensely over the years. The Shape of Things

The Long View: The Years of Rice and Salt

This book review is the source of one of my favorite cocktail party theories: a number of seemingly well-established sciences are built upon an n of 1. In a grand sense, geology and biology fall into this category, since the big theories like plate tectonics and evolution depend on one

The Long View 2005-11-09: French Nuances

We are now back to our regularly scheduled programming. French Nuances Here's an occasion for a bit of Alternative History. Writing for the BBC in a piece entitled Violence exposes France's weaknesses, John Simpson offered this aside on the relationship between France's policy of

The Long View: The Interior Castle

This luminous review of St. Teresa's The Interior Castle finally brings me full circle, back to the mysteries of human experience, and the unity of mystical experience across religions. The Interior Castle By St. Teresa of Avila Translated by: The Monks of Stanbrook, 1911 Spanish Original: Published Circa

The Long View: The Reformation

John reviews a fine one-volume history of the Reformation, marred by a jarring lapse into modern obsessions at the end. The Reformation: A History By Diarmaid MacCulloch Viking, 2004 800 Pages, US$35.95 ISBN: 0670032964 In the later volumes of A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee came to the

The Long View: The Rosicrucian Enlightenment

The Rosicrucian Order is the kind of thing I couldn't get enough of when I was a teenager and a young man, and now bores me to tears. Accordingly, I'm sympathetic to John's critical reading of what the history of such movements really means.

The Long View: Endless Things

I suspect that John's review is rather better than this book. Endless Things a part of Ægypt By John Crowley 400 Pages, US$24.00 Small Beer Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-1-931520-225 Solemnity is out of order in a review of a book that ends with a mountain-top pastorale