Sim Van der Ryn’s Design for an Empathic World is a brief for person-centered design, design that takes the users and the world around a building into account. Van der Ryn sees “forward-thinking companies” doing just what he suggests. He quotes Paul Goldberger on Google’s California campus: “What is really striking about this project . . . isn’t what the architecture will look like. . . . It’s the way in which Google decided what it wanted and how it conveyed... Read more
Travis Ables’s Incarnational Realism is a very fine book, a monograph to learn from, to grapple and battle and argue with. I didn’t find it utterly convincing; but what is? Even when not persuasive, it’s the kind of incisive study that leaves marks and scars and stigmata. What more could one want in a theological treatise? Ables focuses mainly on a close reading of Augustine’s de Trinitate and Barth (mainly Book 4 of the Church Dogmatics). These readings are set against... Read more
I have written on the biblical theology of rivers in the past, arguing that, unlike the sea, rivers are water reconciled with land, water made useful to land. In terms of biblical politics, rivers are Gentiles reconciled to Israel, their glory flowing to Zion to adorn Yahweh’s house. Rivers don’t always stay within their bounds, and when they overflow they are as deadly as the sea. That’s what happens to the Euphrates in Isaiah 8: Assyria, the people from beyond the river,... Read more
I’ve liked Dean Koontz since reading Relentless, where the heroes are a family of home-schooling survivalists. Take that, literary establishment! Koontz was the guest in the NYTBR “By the Book” feature, and his answers to a couple of questions give additional reasons to like him. What book would you like every President to read? he was asked. He answers: “Every president, regardless of party, should read Intellectuals, by Paul Johnson. His portraits of Rousseau, Sartre, Edmund Wilson and others are sharply pointed but accurate, and... Read more
There’s a kind of theology that effectively denies human experience. You may think and feel that X or Y is true, X and Y may well fit your experience, but the Bible or some theological principle tells us otherwise. You are self-deluded about your experience. What else would you expect, given that you’re a finite being who is a rebellious sinner to boot? This tool needs to be in the workbelt of any theology. After all, we are finite and... Read more
As long as he’s in heaven preying on the child of the woman, he is called “dragon” (Revelation 12). Once cast down, his titles multiply: The dragon is also the archaic serpent, called the devil and Satan. A fourfold name for the “ruler of this world” who is cast out by the cross (cf. John 12). As dragon, serpent, devil, Satan, he “deceives the whole oikoumene,” the imperial world. He enlists a beast to deceive the earth-dwellers (Jews? Revelation 13:14),... Read more
Artists can be awfully protective of their work. In his forthcoming Copyright Wars, Peter Baldwin observes that Samuel Beckett “objected . . . when directors performed his plays with women, non-white casts, or incidental music. He sued the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge for playing Endgame in an abandoned Boston subway station and the Comedie Française for doing so on a set bathed in pink light. . . . Beckett also quibbled about stagings of Godot in Dublin, London, Salzburg, Berlin,... Read more
Gabriella Coleman has done field work on the group “Anonymous,” and argues in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy that the group is not violent or dangerous. They’re only out for laughs, laughs of a particular kind indicated by the term lulz, which Coleman defines as “a deviant style of humor and a quasi-mystical state of being.” She acknowledges that Anonymous unexpected has become a direct-action political force: “Anons could be found at the heart of hundreds of political ‘ops’ – becoming integral,... Read more
Mark tells us in a parenthetical aside that Jesus purged all meats, and Peter saw a vision that taught him that he could eat anything (Acts 10-11). Still, as Allen Frantzen details in his recent Food, Eating, and Identity in Early Medieval England, Western Christians continued to observe purity rules for many centuries. Medievals were motivated in part by “respect for Old Testament traditions. The Anglo-Saxons assumed continuity between ancient food cultures and their own. They associated querns in their own settlements... Read more
Over at Grantland, Wesley Morris traces the shift in romantic comedy in the 1980s to the politicization of the genre: “By the 1980s, romantic comedy had started to turn inward, away from fights between two equals. Women took center stage — unless the movie was Tootsie, in which Hoffman wore a wig and a dress. This was how we got from romantic comedy to rom-com: politics. Tootsie was part of a series of workplace comedies in which the romance was essentially, unapologetically... Read more
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