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Were you an architect of the US Empire, you’d have to be quite happy with this situation. But, should we?

Think about it. What credence would we give to the work of a US-based reporter (Borat anyone?) from another country who was unable to understand English? Surely, we would quickly consign it to the realm of the hopelessly shoddy if not the laughably propagandistic. Yet this is exactly the type of stuff that we as a nation imbue with great importance and seriousness every day.

10 April 2011

A Liberal Culture “Stuck to the Metaphor” of its Own Virtues

For Joseph Campbell a frequent impediment to human understanding was the tendency for people to get “stuck to their metaphors.” As a scholar of the manifestations of the divine across cultures, Campbell had a great respect for the role of transcendent forces in peoples’ lives and a keen understanding that all efforts to give them palpable representation were, and are, necessarily metaphorical. In this context, a person who gets stuck on his or her metaphors is one who comes to confuse the local, culturally-constructed representation(s) of godliness with God itself.