The Child

pure demonology, an introduction The satanic is not identical with evil. Evil has direction: it seeks destruction, domination, corruption, or the inversion of what ought to be. The satanic, by contrast, has no allegiance. It is indifferent. Its defining characteristic is not malice but opacity—a mode of being driven by impulse without any commitment to […]

English

The addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance occurred during a particular historical moment in the United States: the early Cold War. The phrase was added through legislation signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on June 14, 1954 (Flag Day). The change was part of a broader effort to distinguish the United States […]

Pleonasm!

That exclamation point always stood out to me. Nothing else takes that tone. I don’t remember many if any more exclamation points. “In war reality rends the words and images that dissimulate it, to obtrude in its nudity and in its harshness. Harsh reality (this sounds like a pleonasm!), harsh object-lesson, at the very moment […]

CF

preface The word is a small word that carries an unusual philosophical weight. It does not announce a beginning. It does not declare an origin. It arrives after something has already been said and refuses to let that thing remain complete. Furthermore means: there is more. But the “more” it introduces is not simply an […]

Trst

what allows something absent to become present? Exchange begins not with objects but with confidence. A coin, a contract, a banknote, a share certificate, and a promise all depend upon something that cannot be weighed or measured: the expectation that meaning will endure beyond the moment of exchange. Money is therefore not simply a technology […]

possible, actual, necessary

For Heidegger, attentiveness is not primarily a matter of concentrating harder or paying closer attention to objects. It is a mode of being open to how beings disclose themselves. The German word Aufmerksamkeit (attentiveness) appears in his work, but even more fundamental are concepts such as Erschlossenheit (disclosedness), Befindlichkeit (attunement), and Achtsamkeit (careful heedfulness). To […]

. Across political philosophy, economics, and systems theory, there persists a shared assumption that order depends on some prior layer of meaning: laws require legitimacy, coordination requires shared models, and stability requires representational coherence between agents and the world they act upon. Even in its most technical forms—equilibrium theory, institutional analysis, or information-based models of […]

11

Shake off slumber, and beware. introduction “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” The pairing of right […]

Tafsīr

“لا يصلح آخر هذه الأمة إلا ما أصلح أولها.”“The latter part of this community will not be rectified except by that which rectified its first part.”—Imām Mālik Part 1 Ta Part 2 Levinas preface What follows is a reading of the Qurʾān as a structured grammar of response, in which cognition, language, and ethical orientation […]

Re: An Introduction

The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the […]

Invocation and Legal Consciousness

Invocation remains real even when arrival is no longer the condition for anything to end. This essay begins from a simple but unstable idea: that meaning is not primarily something we possess, but something that is directed. To speak, to pray, to claim a right, or to issue a law is always to send something […]

Tafsīr

Introduction I first encountered Qur’an 13:14 as part of a listening exercise. A few phrases “stuck out” to me, and I noted them without forcing an interpretation. Only later did I return to those verses with a more systematic approach. I began keeping a journal, writing down the original Arabic and then comparing multiple English […]

Hu

One of the habits I have developed while reading the Qur’an is to return not to every verse, but to the ones that first interrupted me. During my initial reading, I listened to the Qur’an rather than reading it on the page, and whenever a verse lingered in my mind, I wrote it down without […]