Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

(New York: Macmillan, 1983), 272

  • "Thus, the rightful legatee of the greatest of fortunes, the cultural heritage of the entire Western World, its art, science, technology, literature, philosophy, religion, becomes a second-class consumer of these wares and as such disenfranchises itself and sits in the ashes like Cinderella yielding up ownership of its own dwelling to the true princes of the age, the experts...There is an expert for everything that ails me." (77-78)
  • "The wonder to the scientist is not that God made the world but that works of God can e understood in terms of a mechanism without giving God a second thought." (90)
  • Traditional Logic I examples in the section on semiotics: analogical on 94, copula on 97
  • Scientism: "Scientists should be less worried about overt intrusions by religion upon science, which never succeed, and more worried about covert scientific dogma." (161-162)
  • Scientism is "an attitude which extrapolates from the objectivity of the scientific method to an all-construing transcending objectivism, which cannot be neutral" (165-166)
  • "Imagine an adulterous and penitent Catholic looking for a priest and a confessional on PC3 like a character in a Graham Greene novel." (217)
  • cf A Canticle for Leibowitz (220)
  • "God is somehow inextricably and permanently, even hopelessly, involved with the two, the Jews and the Catholic church, until the end of earth time." (242)
  • "Catholics are a queer lot—I've never really gotten used to them." (242)
  • The Abbott: "As Pope, my first act will be to revive the University of Notre Dame around a nucleus of Jewish scientists whom I shall lure from Israel." (243)

Topic: Novel

Source

Created: 2023-11-23-Thu
Updated: 2025-09-13-Sat