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What We Talk About When We Talk About Superheros
I promised myself I’d wait to watch Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Major critical reviews were scathing, but many graphic-novel fans wildly adored Zach Snyder’s latest, and I wanted to review...
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The Scattered Self: Seven Notes from a Strange Month
1 Lately I keep coming back to a Peter Handke poem, one perhaps best known to North Americans through Wings of Desire (1987). Als das Kind Kind war / wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war, comes as gentle a...
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The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Last night something spooked the little animal by my side. When it happened, I felt her claws tense over the blanket; saw the prick of her ears against the apartment’s softer shadows; knew the sudden...
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On the 2015 Hugos, and the Promise of Fantasy and SciFi
In the last week, the Islamic State took control of 90% of a Palestinian refugee district in Damascus, Syria, worsening an already dire situation for some 18,000 human beings trapped within. Meanwhile,...
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Ecce Corda Illorum: K. D. Miller’s Deeply Human Stories of Faith
I’ve read K.D. Miller’s All Saints twice this year–a queer thing for a doctoral candidate to do, laden with all-too-many other books to read. Nonetheless, this little collection of linked stories out...
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Disingenuous Critique: John Gray’s Review of Richard Dawkins
I almost wonder why I’m bothering to write a response to John Gray’s New Republic review of Richard Dawkins’ An Appetite for Wonder: The Makings of a Scientist. I am a strong opponent of hero-worship,...
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An Irish Black Comedy on Strange, Everyday Faith
Calvary John Michael McDonagh Reprisal Films It shouldn’t surprise people that a film about religious belief might fascinate an atheist, but this fact often does. Billions of people espouse belief in...
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Excerpts from the Day’s Readings: Auguste Comte and Slippery Mental Frameworks
I’ve been sitting on a more reflective post, but the long slog of daily readings persists, along with a few other inanities of doctoral student life, so that essay will have to wait awhile. For now I’m...
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Conversation Enders: The Problem with Hero-Worship
Working part-time at a local bookstore is a great reprieve from the isolation of my studies. Just as I get to know many customers’ personal lives, so too have many of them learned that I’m a doctoral...
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Enough Already: The Anti-Atheist Article Shows Its Age
Michael Robbins, writing for Slate Magazine, recently contributed to that most robust literary genre, the anti-atheist op-ed, with a review of Nick Spencer’s Atheists: The Origin of the Species....
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Reading Note: Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
I usually post my doctoral reading notes on Facebook–a bizarre move on my part, since status bars really aren’t made for longer observations–but I’m going to try to publish future notes here instead....
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The Scientist and the Writer
Between doctoral readings, I’ve been trying to squeeze in research for a personal project. Often these secondary readings make me second-guess myself as much as my primary readings (relentlessly, that...
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Addendum: The Ongoing Wonder and Struggle of SciFi Politics
I’ve been going through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as of late–a return to a series that I watched grudgingly as a kid, so loyal was I to Star Trek: The Next Generation that I wasn’t ready to give my...
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On Free Speech, Wisdom, and Writers of SciFi & Fantasy in the Modern World
While I’ve debated applying for membership to the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) since my third SFWA-eligible sale a couple years back, I’m still enough of a grad student that...
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Living in a World of Magical Thinkers
It’s Easter weekend, as the surfeit of chocolate and bunny imagery in store fronts attested to yesterday–and also the heavy-handed Christian parade running down King St., Waterloo, midday. “God...
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New Year, New Story at Market’s End
I surprised myself the other day when I realized just how many stories I’ve written that have not and doubtless will not see publication through magazine channels. A short story collection is still a...
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On the Home Stretch of the First Doctoral Exam
There are just two days to go in my first doctoral exam, a week in which I’ve been writing three papers demonstrating breadth and depth of knowledge in the Victorian era from the ~100 reading units...
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Lament of the Secular Scholar
With a week to go before my first doctoral exam, I still find myself struggling to describe how I feel about this entire process. Before proceeding I should acknowledge that PhD programs are not easy,...
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On Activism: The Trouble with Situation-Specific Response
A few months ago, I got into a conversation about an event that continues to resonate with current issues surrounding freedom of speech, association, and religion: a legal debate about whether an...
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Notes from the New Apartment
It doesn’t take much in the way of mental illness to recognize that, in some very important senses of the term, free will is an illusion we necessarily maintain because we exist as discrete, corporeal...
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