I am, as I write this, sitting in a quiet air-conditioned room in a comfortable, modern library. The window to my right looks out on a bright, sunlit plaza. The plaza hosts a series of high end restaurants, each of which is set up for outdoor dining, with umbrellas to ward off the sun and heaters to keep out the chill. There are maybe a couple of dozen people out there enjoying the warmth of the evening. In observing this scene, a non sequitur of a thought occurs to me. Five thousand seven hundred miles away, a genocide is taking place. People are being starved, shot, and bombed to death with obscene abandon. The contrast is so stark as to be surreal. And yet it’s real. Continue reading
Category Archives: Memorials and Obituaries
Ozzy, RIP
I just read that Ozzy Osbourne died at the age of 76. It seems a little absurd to go on about the death of an aged metal singer at a time like this, but almost any man’s death diminishes me, Ozzy’s included. So forgive me.
Ozzy was a mediocre singer, and the less said about his public persona, the better. But he was blessed to work with some great musicians, and together they wrote some immortal songs. Black Sabbath deserves a place in heaven for “War Pigs” all by itself, but “I Don’t Know,” “Over the Mountain,” “Flying High Again,” and “I Don’t Wanna Stop,” all make worthy contributions to the aesthetic education of man, and are all candidates for the musical equivalent of eternal life. Continue reading
Alfred Brendel (1931-2025)
I read a few days ago that Alfred Brendel had died at the age of 94. To be honest, I was shocked that he was so recently alive. What was a guy like that doing alive at a time like this? I can’t so much confess to any personal sense of loss as a vague sense of bewilderment that Brendel and I ever inhabited the same world. It takes effort to convince oneself that Alfred Brendel and say, Ted Cruz were members of the same biological species and historical milieu. But it turns out they were.
Continue readingAlasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025)
My mentor Alasdair MacIntyre died this past Wednesday, at the age of 96. The last time I spoke to him in person was 2008, on the occasion of my dissertation defense. It had taken me seventeen years, from matriculation to defense, to finish the degree, and even at the defense itself, it was very far from clear whether I would actually finish. A minor civil war broke out within the defense over the merits of my work, but after tense negotiations, I passed. MacIntyre, amused by the fracas, described my having completed the degree as the best of the arguments for the existence of God: only a God, he said, could have ensured that Khawaja crossed the finish line. I laughed at first, but was then given pause. And that, in microcosm, describes my relationship with Alasdair MacIntyre. Continue reading
Karl Ameriks, RIP
I wanted to note the passing of Karl Ameriks (1947-2025), the Emeritus McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. He died yesterday in South Bend, Indiana at the age of 77.
I didn’t know Ameriks particularly well. My first memory was a conversation I had with him in 1991 about what little I knew about Kant’s first Critique. I’d taken an undergraduate course on Kant with Wolfgang Carl, the eminent Kant scholar, and was flattered to learn that Ameriks was interested in my lecture notes. He read them, thanked me for them, but never commented on them. I think he found them more amusing than anything else. Continue reading
Not a Rhetorical Question
How is it that a foreigner, Naftali Bennett, can come to the United States and suggest that Americans be blown up—yet no American has the legal right to suggest that we do the same to Naftali Bennett? I can guarantee that there would be volunteers. At least one.
You Can’t Burn Down Neapolis
Years ago, I went on a long road trip with a Palestinian friend, first to Nablus, then to Nazareth, and eventually to Haifa. Nablus wasn’t officially part of our itinerary; we just stopped there en route to Nazareth to take a bathroom break. We parked the car by the Nasr Mosque in the middle of town, and went in to use the restroom, at which point the call to prayer sounded–for dhuhr, or high noon.
“Do you want to pray?” my friend asked. “Well,” I said half-apologetically, “I’m not really a believer.” “Neither am I,” he retorted. “What I mean is, do you want to go in there and fake it?” He said it so matter-of-factly that I started laughing out loud. “No, seriously,” he insisted. “I think you’ll like it. I fake-pray all the time. It’ll be fun.” So we did. Continue reading
The Sea of Trees
(This post gives away the whole plot of the movie “The Sea of Trees.”)
My wife Alison took her life four years ago today in Toronto–March 4, 2021. She was discovered, still alive, during a pre-scheduled building inspection of her townhouse. She was rushed to the hospital but died there. She’d been hospitalized for an earlier attempt on her life in February of that year, and had made at least one yet earlier attempt several years before we’d been married. Suicide was a preoccupation of hers for the duration of our admittedly brief marriage. She brought it up repeatedly in conversation in ways that are easy enough to remember, but also in ways I ended up suppressing. Continue reading
W. David Solomon (1944-2025), RIP
My dissertation advisor and grad school mentor, William David Solomon (he went by “David”), died this past Wednesday, February 26th. He was 81. I learned a great deal from him, and regret that we hadn’t spoken in over a decade.
He became my advisor somewhat by accident. I went to Notre Dame primarily to study with Alasdair MacIntyre, which I did for several years, until MacIntyre left Notre Dame for Duke. At that point, I had to change advisors and dissertation topic. I’d originally thought to write a dissertation on Aristotle, but ended up writing one on the connections between epistemic foundationalism and the project of finding a ‘foundation’ for ethics. It was an unusual topic, and many people didn’t ‘get’ it. Solomon by contrast was enormously enthusiastic about and supportive of the project (and of me), and let me write it my way. Continue reading
A Christmas Sermon
In the Gospel of St Matthew, we read of King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents. Herod put to death every male child under the age of two in the vicinity of Bethlehem. The Christian response was to render unto state power what belonged to it, without being able to identify what did and what didn’t. The results were predictable. First the Christians accommodated empire. Then Christianity became one.
Continue reading
Policy of Truth 