My Favorite Albums of 2018: BOYS by Caamp (1/5)

              In 2018 the folk group Caamp issued a pair of EPs -- Boys: Side-A and Boys: Side-B -- as if they were each one half of a vinyl LP. Together, these releases constitute a complete 12-track album and thus a proper successor to their masterful 2016 debut Caamp. It has…

Daredevil

A couple months ago, I read that Netflix had canceled Daredevil -- a television series based on the eponymous Marvel Comics character. I had, consciously, scrolled past Daredevil on the Netflix menu on a number of occasions, assuming it was standard superhero fare. Such, alas, is the danger of a saturated audio-visual market: there are so many…

Bob Dylan and Theology

Yesterday marked the beginning of the Spring '19 semester at Villanova, and today I'm debuting a new course -- "Bob Dylan and Theology." Here's the course description: In October 2016, the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature -- an honor that stands as the capstone of his illustrious career. Dylan…

Nick Saban’s “Process” and the Sacrament of Penance

College football season is now over, and once again the Alabama Crimson Tide won the national title. Wait, no. Alabama lost. As a matter of fact, Alabama (14-1) lost in spectacular fashion to Clemson (15-0). The official score was 44-16, the worst loss in program history under legendary coach Nick Saban. What's more, it was…

“Syndicate”: New Symposium

I'm taking part in an online symposium on Syndicate -- a collaborative forum/review for scholars in the Humanities. My particular symposium concerns Noreen Khawaja's The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre (2016). It's a fascinating (and exceedingly well written) book that explores the origins and development of existentialism, paying particular attention to its roots…

Dostoevsky, Scorsese, and Religious Existentialism

I'm speaking tomorrow morning at the APA Eastern Division's meeting in Manhattan. Fittingly, as part of a session hosted by the Society for the Philosophic Study of the Contemporary Visual Arts, my talk is on one of the greatest artists in the history of New York City -- Martin Scorsese. In particular, I'm going to…

Bird Box

I'm only about one-third of the way through the now viral Netflix release Bird Box (dir. Susanne Bier, 2018). It's hard not to think of A Quiet Place (dir. John Krasinski, 2018), but whereas the monsters in that film are aliens and thus natural (albeit not to Earth), the ones in Bird Box are supernatural, demonic. One…

Theology and…Culture?

Søren Kierkegaard (right), walking in Nytorv, Copenhagen This blog presupposes that theology, as a human activity, has to do its work within human culture. Such a claim may carry the whiff of controversy, but it is simply a matter of fact. If, for example, one were to present Thomas Aquinas (died 1274) and Søren Kierkegaard (died 1855) with a series…