Literature and Evolution

I haven't read Brian Boyd's Literature and Evolution: a biocultural approach, and don't intend to. But I've read a number of reviews, including Terry Eagleton's in the latest London Review of Books. And reading that, it occured to me: how do we in fact know that literature is part of the species's apparatus for survival, an tool for adaptation? Mightn't it in fact belong to those of our capacities which will in the end kill us off? Let's not forget that in the end we won't survive, and in not surviving will join most other species that have ever come into existence.

God & spiritual anthropology

A central problem with arguments like that of Charles Taylor's in A Secular Age can be put like this: if man has an inherent appetite for God and transcendence, how come we (i.e. man) lost him (i.e. God)? It follows that, if we are to accept a spiritual anthropology that assumes mankind's hunger for the transcendent, the story of human secularization can only be told coherently from God's side not from man's. It needs to be told as God's plot for man.
And so it must belong theology, not to historical sociology. And a strictly theological account of secularization can only be in dialogue with secular thought, if at all, under strict limits since it needs to believe, against reason and the evidence, in a God who actively concerns himself with man.

Bedtime reading: Saki & Lydia Davis

I tend to read a few pages before I go to sleep, it's an old habit. At the moment I have by my bedside two books: Saki's Collected Stories and Lydia Davis's collection of short fictions, Almost no Memory.
I love both. Each night, I read a story by Saki, and then a story by Davis.
This makes for the strangest of literary experiences: fictions by Davis, US-centred, written around now, avant-garde, theoretically informed, begin to feel as smart (in the British more than in the US sense), artificial and gimmicky as those by Saki, written for the large readerships of Edwardian Britain's newspapers.
It doesn't work the other way.