"EVERYDAY" INNOCENCE

Buddy Holly: a nerdy knight of faith.

by Andy Nowicki

A corrupt age views innocence as an essential absence; that is to say, as a state of being “not guilty.” Since all ages are corrupt, to varying degrees, we never quite apprehend innocence for what it truly is: a positive presence.

Philosophy, after all, teaches that man’s telos is the Good; if this is so, then the condition of innocence can’t simply be dismissively consigned to the silly naivety of childhood, while “knowledge” and “wisdom” get to be associated with an individual’s embracing of the corruption that invariably attends maturity, thus demonstrating his complicity with that which spoils his innocence.

In truth innocence is wisdom, and corruption is folly, NOT the other way around.

DON'T MESS WITH MOHAMMED: A TALE OF TWO PROPHETS

Note: this article was originally posted at The Last Ditch in March 2006. At that time, a Danish magazine's publication of unflattering depictions of Mohammed had touched off riots across much of the Muslim world, resulting in mass destruction and several mob-instigated murders. The article is reposted here and now in 2015, as the points it makes are tragically once again quite relevant in light of last Tuesday's Charlie Hebdo massacre carried out by radical Islamists in Paris.

"He's a prophet and a pusher, partly truth and partly fiction."

by Andy Nowicki

The now-notorious Mohammed cartoons published in Denmark last year have in fact a historical, as well as geographical, precedent. In 1845, a satirical Danish journal named Corsair ran a series of cartoons mocking the appearance of Copenhagen author and personality — and later renowned philosopher and Christian polemicist — Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). The cartoons highlighted the writer's baggy, ill-fitting clothes, particularly focusing attention upon his chronically uneven pant legs.

"THE CROWD IS UNTRUTH"

A crowd in Ferguson, Missouri

by Andy Nowicki

At the age of 41, in the middle of what would prove to be his last year on earth, Danish writer and theologian Soren Kierkegaard shook off all subterfuge, dispensed with his coterie of coy pseudonyms, rejected his heretofore treasured "indirect approach" to polemics, and became for a time a hyper-conspicuous figure in Danish society, passing out homemade literature on street corners and railing against church authorities in a succession of scathingly-worded newspaper columns.

Kierkegaard's antics made a generally negative impression upon the Copenhagen cognoscenti, who mostly regarded him as a nuttering nuisance, or at best an eccentric monomaniac publicly flogging an increasingly woebegone spiritual hobbyhorse in a most unseemly manner. Yet the Kierkegaardian critique of the state-funded Danish Lutheran church, if severe, was in fact quite astute, and his approach, while brazen, avoided overt self-indulgence.

WE'VE LOST THAT EDENIC FEELING

"Whoopsie daisy! Took a wrong turn out of Paradise, and wound up in Hell."

by Andy Nowicki

According to the Bible, God decided at an early stage, following the initial construction of the heavens and the earth, that "It was not good for man to be alone." The Almighty then devised a plan for man to find fulfillment in his own kind; that is, he split humanity in two, creating wo-man (or "out of man") from the first man's rib.