Finally finished ‘Foundation and Empire’. Oh em gee. That ending was great. The Mule is a brilliant character, and I really didn’t see his big ‘reveal’ at the end of the story coming. I’m going to start ‘Second Foundation’ tonight, and very much cannot wait.
I got Nussbaum’s ‘Therapy of Desire’ the other day – it’s a massive study of Hellenistic ethics, which is something I got interested while reading Wolterstorff’s criticism of eudaimonistic ethics in ‘Justice: Rights and Wrongs’. I love reading books like this – books in which a real scholar does real scholarly work without being pretentious. I’m about 45 pages or so in, and her handling of the subject is masterful – she’s a scholar who has truly immersed herself in Hellenistic ethics, and it shows. 10/10.
I also got James K.A. Smith’s ‘Imagining the Kingdom’. The first part of the book is basically constructing a liturgical anthropology and phenomenology of perception as well as a ‘theory of practice’ based on the whole person over against what Smith calls ‘intellectualism’ or the idea that all man is is a thinking thing. Lots and lots and lots of interaction with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which is cool, because he’s not someone with whom I’m familiar with except for the name and that he’s French. Big focus on the roles of habit and narrative in how we perceive and constitute the world.
Theologians, Inc. 