Author: Andrew Taggart
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Work Is Nothing Special: See This And Be Free
One thing that has become clearer to me since reading Michael Walzer’s The Revolution of the Saints (1965) is that we probably owe our fetishization of work in key part and in one specific way to the Puritans. Let me explain. What’s interesting about Puritans is that they averred that each believer had a “particular calling,” one, to…
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Michael Walzer’s The Revolution Of The Saints: The Discipline Of Work And The Discipline Of Faith
Fittingly perhaps, I just finished reading Michael Walzer’s The Revolution of the Saints: A Study of the Origins of Radical Politics (1965). Walzer’s subject is Calvinism on the continent and Puritanism in England. His aim is to shed fresh light on what crucial role Puritan theology, ideology, and conduct played in the creation of a Puritan…
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What Mayor De Blasio’s Order Tells Us About The Wasteland Called Secular Modernity
A Hasidic Funeral On April 28 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a reported 2500 Hasidic Jewish men and women came out to mourn the death of a beloved Hasidic rabbi. Eye witness reports described the streets as packed with people, many of whom were neither wearing masks nor obeying social distancing. In an especially dramatic and forceful…
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Total Work’s Ideological Capture Via YOUR Enthusiasm
You might be inclined to think that the chief way that the Total Work system remains afloat is by “sticks and circuses” alone. The sticks come in the forms of public education disciplining, massive student loan debt, wage slavery, and the fact of being coerced into taking a bullshit job. And the circuses are evident…
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The Ripening Of Love And A Call To Art
The views we have about love’s presumptive necessary course, views often held by the art world, are very skewed. As you get older, we’ve heard, you’ll grow apart from your significant other. Or you’ll take each other for granted. Or you’ll be less sexually interested in one another. Or you’ll come to be like “friends”…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 