The Misplaced Love of the Dead: And Other Essays in Transformative Ethics

Philosophy/Ethics The 'sacrifice of the intellect' is today mostly either a convenience or a contrivance. The marketeer assuages the consumer by her own feigned idiocy, the parish pirate invites the listless into his own fraudulent faith. It is exceedingly rare, in my estimation, to discover an authentically latter-day saint. But the ignominious fate of faith in our own time is mimicked by the corresponding downfall of reason, which in its turn is mostly used to calculate social control, warfare, or at best, economic trends. Could it be, for the first time in the history of human consciousness, that both reason and faith, in the face of their respective sacrifices, need one another more than ever, the separated siblings and estranged lovers that they are? That we live inside the question of our own existence should not be seen as a too-cunning conundrum, generating only misery and angst, pathos and melancholy. Rather it is the very thrownness of being which we are; resolute in our being-ahead, caring in our anxiety, concernful in our running along. Who better to respond to such a question that, though it bears the historicity of existence alone, marks us in our essence with a history of ontology that is shared and which constitutes our specific nature? (From the book) "Though it is not directly a part of my job as a critical philosopher, offending as many people as possible as succinctly as possible is a commonplace effect of my work." So Loewen opens 'The Return of the Martyr,' a wickedly funny and equally perceptive critique of the moral panics surrounding the issue of gender identity and other fashionable faux pas. And this is merely one of the over twenty singularly insightful essays collected here for the first time. Nothing is beyond a reasoned and rational reproach, and each piece serves as a role model for the rest of us to take up the torch of a truly transformative ethics." (From the publisher)