Leadingchurch.com

This question resolves itself in this book into a long discussion of a fundamental issue brought up by the sack and by important moral exemplars in Roman history. Is suicide a sin? Is life worth the effort of living it? This is not a question local only to Augustine’s age, of course. When we are faced with the apparent absurdity of the world, Hamlet asks, “To be, or not to be?” And the French existentialist writer Albert Camus put it frankly in The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is only one truly important philosophical question, and that is suicide.” By the way, for all his atheist, existentialist Frenchness, Camus actually wrote his master’s thesis in large part on Saint Augustine.

(Page 101).

Course notes https://www.audible.com/pd/Religion-Spirituality/Books-That-Matter-The-City-of-God-Audiobook/B01M3ODH4V

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/marshmallow-mob-evergreen-state/

https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/24/15681958/what-is-web-definition

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-awful-pleasures-of-spiritual-pornography/#

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/miley-cyruss-creepy-return-to-wholesomeness

As Zeba Blay pointed out on the Huffington Post, Cyrus’s casual trying-on and discarding of black culture is a function of extraordinary privilege. That she has essentially scrubbed her music and image of any hints of the hip-hop and R. & B. she once lauded and imitated makes her previous embrace of those genres feel disingenuous, if not sinister.

The whole good-girl routine would feel like a sendup—a comment on the pliability of persona, or on pop costuming, both literal and figurative, or on our racially polarized political climate—if that kind of commentary were Cyrus’s thing. But it’s not—when I spoke to her in 2014 (back then, she and Hemsworth were done, she was dating a woman, and had taken to sticking her tongue out all the time), I was struck by how earnest she seemed about everything. She pulls from a seemingly bottomless font of sincerity; on the telephone, she would periodically get so riled up I’d have to ask her to stop pressing the phone to her face because all I could hear was beeping from the buttons.

Manuel Noriega, Dictator Ousted by U.S. in Panama, Dies at 83 https://nyti.ms/2ri42cd