(This is good news for the tree.) Dubin, the non-pious Jew, lives in his intellectual work, which condemns him to be alienated from life, from the trees, even if the subjects of his work
idolatrize nature's call, thus tempting him in a direction that proves destructive for him and all around him: Dubin hopes, especially through "wild" Fanny, to out-Lawrence Lawrence.
PZ: I'm profoundly disturbed by the complacency of those who
idolatrize and brandish their smart phones.
(11) The spirit is a subversive towards those who trust their ability to escape their historical being, towards those who trust their ability to calculate, to dominate, to foresee it, and eventually also towards those who
idolatrize it.
It was meant to be an instrument with which to confront the future with certainty and security, not to
idolatrize the past or to use the past as an excuse for our own failings (victimhood and self-pity are not good raw materials upon which to build a robust future).
The two sorts of relic -- Donne's body and his poems -- are elided in Henry Valentine's fear that `Succeeding ages would
Idolatrize, / And as his Numbers, so his Reliques prize'.(36) This poses a further difficulty: if Donne's poems are his relics, which ones does he want to be remembered by?
One cannot credibly complain about a civil religion that
idolatrizes the State while ignoring evangelical Christianity during the last third of the 20th century.
The mechanical age is an age that
idolatrizes rationality and maintains a strict social hierarchy.