Mark Lilla’s dissection of identity politics in The Once and Future Liberal is incisive. He doesn’t spare the conservative movement or the Republican party in the least, but he at his sharpest in analyzing what he calls the “abdication” of liberalism and the Democratic party. Liberals, he argues, once had a vision for all of America and all Americans. Reagan brought an end to the dominance of Rooseveltian liberalism, but instead of renewing the liberal vision, liberals “lost themselves in… Read more

Someone asked me recently about my views on church and state. I replied that I advocate a “Christendom model” of church-state relations. Then I proceeded to qualify. When I was done qualifying, I suddenly wondered whether what I call “Christendom” corresponds to what other people understand by the word. It seems a useful exercise to discriminate what Christendom gets right and what it gets wrong. One of the sources of ambiguity is that Christendom can be used both to describe… Read more

Ezra begins where 2 Chronicles ends, with the decree of Cyrus. Some scholars have argued that the repetition indicates that the books were once united. It’s said that the doubling is an ancient literary device to knot together two sections of a text. Whether that is the case or not, the links between Chronicles and Ezra go beyond the repetition of Cyrus’s decree. In the first volume of his Anchor Bible Commentary on 1 Chronicles 1-9 (77-80), Gary Knoppers sums up the… Read more

James Simpson briefly reviews the career of the 17th-century iconoclast William Dowsing in his history of iconoclasm, Under the Hammer. What motivated Dowsing, he argues, wasn’t an effort to prioritize the word over the image, but a quest for “jurisdictional clarity.” With the triumph of Parliament, the complex jurisdictional space of medieval Britain was simplified: “A single jurisdiction (of a Puritan Parliament) replaces a triple, overlapping jurisdiction of monarch, Parliament, and clergy; and those new jurisdictional imperatives seek symbolic realization… Read more

The key question regarding Freud, says Rosenstock-Huessy (In the Cross of Reality, 266), is “Whom did Freud obey when he began to develop his theory?” The question arises because “in Freud’s relational system there is no place for Sigmund Freud’s own experience.” He shares this distinction of an un-theorized self with Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche. None of them has a place for himself “as originators, as authors, as Yous.” It’s not a foregone conclusion that such seminal figures (“new souls,”… Read more

Alexandra Schwartz’s New Yorker essay on self-improvement movements (“Improving Ourselves to Death”) starts out breezily enough, but it turns grim pretty fast. The “death” in her title isn’t metaphorical. She summarizes the experiment of Carl Cederström and André Spicer, who tried to improve one area of their lives each month for a year. They ended up lost and confused: “In December, with the end of their project approaching, Spicer reflects that he has spent the year focussing on himself to the… Read more

In a TLS review of Kontantin Barsht’s Drawings and Calligraphy of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Robert Bird reminds us that Dostoevsky was a “trained draughtsman” who “thought in images no less than in words: “He wrote frequently about painting, and many of his key terms suggest visual, rather than verbal communication, from ‘impression’ (vpechatlenie) to ‘disfiguration’ (bezobrazie). In his novels major characters first emerge as faces, and then persist as gazes; think of the self-sacrificing prostitute Sonya Marmeladova staring silently at Raskolnikov… Read more

In his temple sermon, Jeremiah warns the people of Jerusalem that Solomon’s temple is going to share the same fate at Shiloh (Jeremiah 7:1-15). Shiloh is where the Mosaic tabernacle was pitched when Israel entered the land. It remained there until the Philistines destroyed it and captured the ark (1 Samuel 4-6). Jeremiah is saying that Gentiles will destroy the temple, slaughter its priests, and take away its furniture. It’s Shiloh redux. Theopolis student John Crawford pointed to the sequel in 1… Read more

Chris Kraus reviews Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix’s Punk is Dead in the TLS. It was a short-lived movement, with a golden age of “between four and eighteen months,” and was over by 1978. That obsolescence was built-in, as philosopher Simon Critchley says in an interview in the book: “Because of the acute awareness of the fact that punk . . . would become a creature of the very music industry whose codes it subverted, we knew that it was going to be… Read more

Musicologist and philosopher Jenny Judge thinks that the mind is more than a machine. Music provides the evidence. According to some philosophers, “if you can’t consciously represent the finer details of a guitar solo, the way is surely barred to having any grasp of its nuances. Claiming that you have a ‘merely visceral’ grasp of music really amounts to saying that you don’t understand it at all. Right?” That’s not the way life works, though: “we allow ourselves to be… Read more

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