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The Silence Camus Refused to Domesticate: Hazel Barnes, The Myth of Sisyphus, and the Cost of a Sympathetic Misreading

Hazel Barnes was one of the most careful American readers of French existentialism in the twentieth century. She translated Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1956, a labor that shaped how generations of American students encountered Continental thought. When she turns to Camus, though, something interesting happens on the page. Her summary of The Myth of Sisyphus is partly accurate and partly an act of quiet translation in the other direction, pulling Camus toward a Sartrean humanism that Camus himself spent the last decade of his life resisting.

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The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

The God in the Wire book cover

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God is the Bigger Elvis, but Dolores is Bigger than God

Dolores Hart used to be a movie star.  Now she’s a nun.  “God is the Bigger Elvis” is her redacted life story in HBO documentary form and the whole, sordid, film is one sorry sad sack of an unimaginative, wasted, life:

IT is a story straight out of Hollywood. A beautiful young starlet walks away from a blossoming movie career to become a nun, and 50 years later she returns to the Academy Awards ceremony — as the subject of an Oscar-nominated film.

The real-life drama of Dolores Hart, known as Mother Prioress to the nuns here at the Abbey of Regina Laudis, unfolds in the HBO film “God Is the Bigger Elvis,” one of five nominees for best documentary (short subject). The 35-minute film examines Mother Dolores’s transformation from a Hollywood ingénue and the recipient of Elvis Presley’s first on-screen kiss to a cloistered Benedictine nun at the abbey, where for the past nine years she has been the prioress, the second in authority below the abbess, Mother David Serna.

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God and His Public Relations Problem: Ten Sentence Story #163

God realized he had a PR problem.

Satan was more popular and more powerful — and He didn’t know why.

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The Hand of a Crystal God: Ten Sentence Story #132

Robert awoke to find the crystal hand of God had shattered between his fingers overnight.

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Believing in a Cruel God

My email Inbox and my Facebook page have been overflowing with hate ever since the publication of my article — If Republicans Won Their Wants — and the comments stream for that article have to be cleansed daily because people can’t abide our comments policy and disagree without cursing or calling names.

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Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: The Review

A couple of days ago, the Cambridge University Press sent me a fresh copy of their latest book by Steve Stewart-Williams:  Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life:  How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Thought You Knew.

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The Forsaken God and the Dotted Dead

I previously wrote about the — Ground Zero Mosque — and the fact that the mosque in question is, and has been, an active worship center and that it stands three blocks away from where the Twin Towers fell.  The mosque is located in the old Burlington Coat Factory building, and the fact that it is still called “The Ground Zero Mosque,” instead of “The Old Burlington Coat Factory Building Mosque,” is wretched testimony to the disgusting incivility of the conservative media warmongers who prefer to kill their enemies from afar and directly berate those here at home who do not agree with their punishing politics while they celebrate religious bigots like Terry Jones who prefer to burn the Koran instead of saying a prayer.

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Religion and Psychiatry

If you have $200.00USD to spare, there’s a book you need to buy — “Religion and Psychiatry:  Beyond Boundaries” — and if you don’t have that much scratch, I’ll try to fill you in on a bit of what you’re missing.

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Moral Indoctrination and the Church

The Greeks made a bold move and removed the question of morality from the secular world and replaced that mandate with the universal ideal of ethical behavior governed by laws.  We became a people of rules and laws and ethics in the state — making us completely unique in the world — because no other competing species for our time and space is able to cognitively think, make value judgments and create a standard, equitable, criteria for living as citizens that requires we help each other instead of trying to kill each other.  We are ruled by our minds and not our emotional instincts.  We have patterns of written expectation we agree to adhere to in order to get along with each other — and the role of the historic Church in antiquity was to mediate the meticulous, and sometimes tenuous, dyad between a people and their state — and to help regulate an effervescent values system and to negotiate a context for living a moral life in a shapeshifting world.

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