In some democratic countries there are also strong journalistic norms against publishing the names and photos of those arrested for crimes until they have been formally charged. This has never been so in the United States, where the perp walk, in which someone recently arrested is paraded before the cameras in handcuffs, is regularly performed.

They experience the miraculous in a cosmos that they believe has no miracle maker, and they feel an inner obligation to maintain the integrity of that experience and not bruise its fruits. I wonder how many are aware that they are struggling with the same dilemma all mystics do when the numinous experience is over—that of finding a way to live in a

A confrontation with uncertainty is a confrontation with the limits of our knowledge, which the wisest of philosophers have assured us is an excellent thing. It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, said John Locke, and he was right. So why are we so often foolish sailors? Why do we set off on the rough seas of empty

After all, didn’t Saint Paul declare, If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new? The fantasy is that we can wipe the psychological slate clean and start over; the reality is that such superficial converts learn to sweep things under the rug and become even greater mysteries to

It is as if we woke up that morning, looked ourselves in the mirror, and thought, Who are you to tell me what to do?

Augustine took a characteristically darker view of things, calling curiosity an inbred and insatiable lust of the eyes, a sin.

It is one thing to resist toxic knowledge of the inner self, as Oedipus and Augustine did. It is another thing, initially more puzzling, to resist knowledge of abstract truths or external reality, which can help us navigate the world and reach our own ends. But we do resist, often with equal vigor. And there is a reason for that: the less the

On this assumption, infants are not starting a journey into a world that they will make their own through experience and reflection on that experience. Rather, they stand as an alternative to our fallen world, a symbol of what we might have been had we not succumbed to it. Knowledge drawn from experience—perhaps especially knowledge of

Instead, God in his wisdom sent to the young Church Paul of Tarsus, who heaped scorn on the learned and idealized the blessed emptiness of those he praised as fools. His writings became the petri dish in which a distinctive strain of anti-intellectualism developed within Christendom and thrives in our secular age. It is no exaggeration to say that