Costica Bradatan wants us to attend to The Other Bishop Berkeley. The Berkeley that is most often studied is the one who addresses issues of interest to contemporary philosophy. Bradatan looks instead at Berkeley’s sources and the uses he makes of them. From this angle, it becomes apparent that Berkeley works within the medieval framework that sees the world as a liber mundi, a book of nature. Berkeley writes, “the phenomena of nature, which strike on the senses and are... Read more
Fellow Alabamian Quin Hillyer says that Trump should pay attention to what’s happening in Alabama if he wants to help American workers. Forbes.com rated Mobile America’s top mid-sized city for manufacturing growth in 2015, and the growth has come from foreign companies: With 4,200 employees, Austal Shipyards is the area’s largest manufacturer. Its corporate home is Australia. At Brookley Field, where Trump’s private jet landed for his 2015 rally, VT Mobile Aerospace Engineering, whose parent company is Singapore Technologies Engineering,... Read more
In his recent study of figural exegesis, Time and the Word, Ephraim Radner traces the “fate of figural reading.” The Middle Ages form a crucial stage in that history. Drawing on the work of Friedrich Ohly, Radner argues that the “medieval typology was part of a long-standing outlook that remained in place, mutatis mutandis, well into the early modern period. . . . typology is bound to a certain conception of time, one presented in terms of historical unity. It... Read more
Timothy Beal (Religion and Its Monsters) analyzes Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1926) as a tale of two monsters. First is “unhindered industry . . . as a cult of human sacrifice to the industrial machine.” The city’s “power house” is a “giant, steam-spewing industrial machine . . . with a large stairway in the center” (152). When Freder, son of Jon Frederson, the Master of Metropolis, sees it, he cowers in front of it. As he watches, “a worker in... Read more
Adam Seligman compares Modernity’s Wager to Pascal’s: Pascal’s wager of the seventeenth century, of reason for faith, was replaced in the eighteenth century by a wager over the terms of sacrality. Modern culture and politics, I argue, staked its all on the ability to construct an authoritative locus of sacrality on a foundation of transcendental rather than transcendent dictates. We have eschewed any idea of the revealed truth of a transcendent Being in favor of “self-evident” truths, thought to be... Read more
Adam Seligman compares Modernity’s Wager to Pascal’s: Pascal’s wager of the seventeenth century, of reason for faith, was replaced in the eighteenth century by a wager over the terms of sacrality. Modern culture and politics, I argue, staked its all on the ability to construct an authoritative locus of sacrality on a foundation of transcendental rather than transcendent dictates. We have eschewed any idea of the revealed truth of a transcendent Being in favor of “self-evident” truths, thought to be... Read more
Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss, 41) quotes a poem, “These Poems, She Said” by Robert Bringhurst, which Wiman says he “carried . . . in my mind like a totem.” It begins: These poems, these poems,these poems, she said, are poemswith no love in them. These are the poems of a manwho would leave his wife and child becausethey made noise in his study. These are the poemsof a man who would murder his mother to claimthe inheritance. And continues:... Read more
Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss, 41) quotes a poem, “These Poems, She Said” by Robert Bringhurst, which Wiman says he “carried . . . in my mind like a totem.” It begins: These poems, these poems,these poems, she said, are poemswith no love in them. These are the poems of a manwho would leave his wife and child becausethey made noise in his study. These are the poemsof a man who would murder his mother to claimthe inheritance. And continues:... Read more
Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss, 51-2) claims that some poets—“surprisingly few”—possess “a very particular gift for making a thing at once shine forth in its ‘thingness’ and ramify beyond its own dimensions.” He sites several lines from Norman MacCaig: “Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass / And hang zigzag on hedges.” “The black cow is two native carriers / Bringing its belly home, slung from a pole.” This is not, Wiman thinks, a matter of “the extraordinary discovered... Read more
Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss, 51-2) claims that some poets—“surprisingly few”—possess “a very particular gift for making a thing at once shine forth in its ‘thingness’ and ramify beyond its own dimensions.” He sites several lines from Norman MacCaig: “Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass / And hang zigzag on hedges.” “The black cow is two native carriers / Bringing its belly home, slung from a pole.” This is not, Wiman thinks, a matter of “the extraordinary discovered... Read more
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