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Below the Mesh

The light year is a bookkeeping unit that has been promoted, by repetition and by the poverty of better language, into a cosmic speed limit. Both halves of that sentence are wrong in slightly different ways. A light year measures the distance a photon covers in one orbit of Earth around the Sun, and it measures that distance against the stage on which photons and Earths and Suns appear. We treat that stage as the bedrock of reality because every instrument we have ever built reports back from inside it. Our instruments cannot, by their nature, report from anywhere else. A fish with sophisticated sonar maps the reef in exquisite detail and concludes the reef is all there is. The water is invisible because the water is the medium of seeing.

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The Avant-Garde Never Left: Robert Hughes Described the Revolution and Then Declared It Over

Robert Hughes wanted it both ways. In the final moments of “The Shock of the New,” his landmark 1980 BBC series on modern art, he declared the avant-garde dead and then, in the same breath, described its beating heart. He told us that the radical project of art was finished, that the market had swallowed it whole, that the institutions had filed its teeth down to nothing. And then he said this: the task of art is “done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.” That sentence is the avant-garde. Hughes described the thing he claimed to be burying.

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The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

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The Finite Lens: How a Fragile Life Gives Shape to an Infinite Universe

The question arrives early and stays late: what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life inside an infinite, eternal universe? Every serious person encounters this problem, usually around the age when the body first betrays its limits, and no one resolves it cleanly. Theology dissolves the question by denying its premise. Science measures the mismatch with such precision that the human side of the equation vanishes into decimal places. And the popular existentialist answers, the ones printed on coffee mugs and quoted in commencement speeches, have been sanded down so thoroughly that they function as anesthesia rather than analysis.

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Outline of an Approach to Christian Apologetics

This essay originated as a reply to David Boles in the comments section of Saugstad’s first guest article, “Postmodernism and Christianity.” It is published here as a standalone essay with the author’s permission.

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