In his biography of G. K. Chesterton , Ian Ker summarizes Chesterton’s analysis of Francis’s praise of creation: “Francis’s ‘great gratitude’ for existence was not just a feeling or sentiment: it was ‘the very rock of reality,’ besides which ‘all facts’ were ‘fancies.’ This was ‘the fundamental fact which we over up, as with curtains, with the illusion of ordinary life’: ‘He who has seen the whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the... Read more
One of Handel’s go-to techniques was “madrigalism,” which took its name from its use in Renaissance madrigals. Calvin Stapert defines madrigalism as “imitation of a word or phrase by the music – for example, an ascending scale on the word ‘climb,’ fast notes on ‘run,’ a sharp dissonance on ‘pain’” ( Handel’s Messiah: Comfort for God’s People , 83). It was a device of musical “rhetoric,” which is how Baroque theorists categorized it. Stapert admits that the technique seems “naive,”... Read more
In one of the essays in The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States , Gordon Wood notes that American policy concerning the Western frontier “rested on the assumption that settlement of the western territories would be neat and orderly.” If wasn’t. Far from it: “The people moving west ignored the federal government’s Indian policies and refused to buy land at the expensive prices at which it was being offered. They shunned the speculator’s land, violated... Read more
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1970s, the US engaged in a series of Asian wars. They were “not separate and unconnected,” as often believed, argue Michael Hunt and Steven Levine in Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam . Rather, “they were phases in a U.S. attempt to establish and maintain a dominant position in eastern Asia sustained over some seven decades against considerable resistance . . . . The Philippines... Read more
Dubai came to the world’s attention only a few years ago, writes Daniel Brook in A History of Future Cities . It looked like an unprecedented miracle: “The instant global metropolis with a ‘skyline on crack’ captivated the world with record-setting skyscrapers, indoor ski slopes, and a stunningly diverse population. With 96 percent of its population foreign-born, Dubai makes even New York City’s diversity – 37 percent of New Yorkers are immigrants – seem mundane. As a pair of American... Read more
I offer some thoughts on Pentecost, Babel, and Enlightenment at Firstthings.com this morning. Read more
In her contribution to Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (The Middle Ages Series) , Anna Harrison concludes that “Bernard [of Clairvaux’s] conception of community among the saints in heaven is limited” (204). She elaborates: “Although he does talk about common experience among the saints and about reciprocity, or sharing of experience, interaction among the saints simply does not figure prominently in his thought. It appears that Bernard has not fully worked out the relationship between... Read more
Time exists, argues Lee Smolin Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe . Space, though – space is secondary, an emergent property, a manifestation of some deeper reality. What might that be? In his NYRB review of Smolin’s book, James Gleick anwers: “For space, the deeper reality is a network of relationships. Things are related to other things; they are connected, and it is the relationships that define space rather than the other way... Read more
Before the Federal Vision, there was the Norman Shepherd controversy, which shook Westminster Seminary in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though repeatedly exonerated, Shepherd was ultimately dismissed for the good of the seminary. It was a convoluted and intensely personal and political battle, and fortunately we now have Ian Hewitson’s Trust and Obey (Norman Shepherd and the Justification Controversy at Westminister Seminary) to help us sort through the mess and learn some lessons. The seminary’s board, Hewiston concludes, “acted... Read more
When the Presbyterian General Assembly determined that Catholic baptism was not valid, Charles Hodge was “overwhelmed.” He was sure it was an anomaly, and that most Presbyterians would not believe that Catholics “lived and died unbaptized,” since such a position was “in opposition to all previous practice, and to the principles of every other Protestant church.” He was wrong. As Paul Gutjahr notes in his Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (236-9) , Hodge’s argument for the validity of Catholic... Read more
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