Category: Books
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The CIA Wants Me to Believe What? — Part 3: Having Read the Fiction Volumes of Sekret Machines
My last two posts were reflections about the non-fiction volumes of Tom DeLonge’s Sekret Machines series. The conclusions I reached based on those two volumes can be summarized in the following points: Each of these elements is on full display in the fictional narrative of the two published volumes of Sekret Machines, subtitled Chasing Shadows […]
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The CIA Wants Me to Believe What? Part 2 — Addendum to Analysis after Reading Sekret Machines: Man, Volume II of God’s, Man, & War
It’s almost impossible to write or speak about the things that DeLonge and Levenda discuss–and to do so in a way that considers them and their implications serious topics–without a certain degree of anxiety. That anxiety isn’t over the topics themselves. I am not in fear of being abducted by EBEs and taken to their […]
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The CIA Wants Me to Believe What? — An Introductory Analysis of Sekret Machines: Gods, Volume I of Gods, Man, & War
The UFO phenomenon has been ongoing since at least the summer of 1947, when the Roswell UFO incident occurred. Since then, stories about several famous UFO incidents have consistently been told. Barney and Betty Hill‘s abduction experience in 1961. The Rendlesham Forest incident in 1980. The Phoenix Lights event of 1997. And many others in […]
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The Monopoly on Violence and the Christian View of the State
There is general agreement within the academic disciplines related to political science that the concept of “the state” is founded upon the idea, most famously recognized by Max Weber, as a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Acemoglu, et al. 2013, 6). This idea is more colloquially known as […]
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Interpreting Bonhoeffer with Cathcart, Wolfe, and Voltaire: A Reflection that Began Upon Reading There Is No God and Mary Is His Mother
As one can probably tell from previous posts, I often write about what I’ve read. I also often try to synthesize ideas based on multiple books I’ve read. Sometimes this is an organized, deliberate effort. Other times, this is almost stream-of-consciousness and resembles a private journal entry more than a book review or essay. This […]
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Telling the Truth When Truth-Telling is Hard to Do: Reflections on Reading Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss
In keeping with the theme of truth-telling that I’ve developed over the last couple of posts, I recently read Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss. The book itself was not written as a book, but it is a collection of four articles with an introduction to their theme–itself based on a fifth […]
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Rebellion: When, Why, and How–A Synthesis of Recent Reading
I recently read three books in succession that, without intending such an outcome, I found to be linked conceptually. The three books, in the order I read them: In my synthesis of these three books’ ideas, I’m going to deal with them out of order. First, I’ll deal with Camus, then Cunningham, and, finally, with […]
Of Gods and Governments 