Once again, it is time for a new edition of the Curving Normality Blog Carnival. Last edition was a bit short, but I’m happy to see that people still have send in their posts, even while I didn’t put out a ‘call for blogs’. Nevertheless, today I present a new edition with interesting posts on morality, war, the afterlife, and religion!
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The problem is that the culture war we are in at the end of the twentieth century posits opposing and, often enough, mutually exclusive visions of the public good. (p. 15)
The state’s involvement on questions of the public good is not a trifling matter. (p. 19)
We Americans generally want to think of ourselves as good people. That, in many respects, is where the trouble begins.
How far is a single man willing to push scientific advancement in order to better God? Victor Hoppe is willing to go far, very far. This is the central theme of the book by Stefan Brijs, soon to be translated in English. In English, it will be called `The Angel Maker’, in Dutch ‘De engelenmaker’. The book chronicles the life of Victor Hoppe, a man who the reader learns about when he moves into an old house in the little village of Wolfheim.
The book consists of three parts, all narrating the story from different perspectives. The first part of the book tells the middle part of the life of Victor Hoppe from the perspective of the inhabitants of Wolfheim. These village people only see the strange man coming, and with him he has three little children. The man is a doctor, but never shows himself, nor his children. It takes almost a year before the villagers see the three children for the first time. When asked what happened to the mother of his children, the doctor responded “The children do not have a mother, they never had“. Their names are Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael.