In her “new history” of The Reformation, Lee Palmer Wandel offers a stark, sobering summary of the shattering effects of the Reformation. “By 1600, Europe was no longer ‘Christian.’ Some places were Lutheran, some, Catholic, some Reformed. Even if we recognize them all as Christian, they did not. Some sovereigns still looked to Rome as the head of all Christendom. One was a head of a church, of England, coterminous with her jurisdiction. Others governed lands where the Book of... Read more
Hesiod’s “Hymn to Hekate” seems to interrupt the Theogony to no good purpose. Hekate isn’t a major goddess, and the hymn doesn’t seem to be integrated into the rest of the poem. In her forthcoming bilingual edition of Hesiod’s poems, Kimberly Johnson argues that “Hekate is integral to the poem’s concerns, central not only to its structure but also to its arguments.” She is, for starters, the one Titan who remains after Zeus’s triumph, honored even by Zeus himself. Thus,... Read more
In his book, Disenchanted Night, Wolfgang Schivelbusch considers the difference between lighting by torches and lighting with candles. With the torch, “the site of combustion and the fuel are one and the same thing, while in the candle they are clearly separated. From now on the wick acts as the sole site of combustion, and it is fed the material the flame needs by the fuel reservoir (the wax cylinder of the candle, the container of oil in the lamp),... Read more
In his Aesthetics of Architecture, Roger Scruton summarizes RG Collingwood’s distinction between art and craft. It has a surface plausibility: “Initially it seems quite reasonable to distinguish the attitude of the craftsman—who aims at a certain result and does what he can to achieve it—from that of the artist, who knows what he is doing, as it were, only when it is done.” Scruton rightly argues that architecture “casts doubt on that distinction,” since on Collingwood’s definition architecture must be... Read more
Patrick Deneen (Democratic Faith, xiv) tells the story of the desacralization of the Cathedral of Saint Genevieve in 1791. The national assembly decided to “rededicate the basilica as a resting place for France’s revolutionary heroes. Above its doors were carved the words, ‘Aux grands hommes la Patrie reconaissante’ (The nation honors its great men).” The former cathedral remained a central site of France’s culture wars through the following century: “Battles over the status of the building continued through the nineteenth... Read more
“There’s a new ‘sacred’ in town,” write Juan and Stacey Floyd-Thomas in The Altars Where We Worship. It’s not the old sacred of church, word, sacrament. They write, “Statistics reveal a startling gap between confession and practice in American religion. Slightly more than 70 percent of Americans in 2014 considered themselves Christian (a drop of nearly 8 percent since 2007). Comparatively few actually show up at religious services in any given week. When Gallup asks the question annually, the survey... Read more
Zygmunt Bauman thinks we are awash in nostalgia. We have created a Retrotopia. Nostalgia, he argues, “is but one member of the rather extended family of affectionate relationship with an ‘elsewhere.’” Thus retrotopia shares characteristics with utopian inspirations and progressive projects, the main difference being that the Angel of History (Walter Benjamin) has made a U-turn, no longer moving forward while looking back but attempt to move backward while looking forward to a receding future. There is a double negation... Read more
Summarizing the argument of Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler, the Economist reports: “inequality within countries is almost always either high or rising, thanks to the ways that political and economic power buttress each other and both pass down generations. It does not, as some have suggested, carry within it the seeds of its own demise.” Inequality can be reduced, but historically, “only four things, Mr Scheidel argues, cause large-scale levelling. Epidemics and pandemics can do it, as the Black Death... Read more
Two hundred years ago this month, Jane Austen put aside her pen for the last time, dating an unfinished novel that has come to be known as Sanditon. Anthony Lane thinks the novel shows that, despite her physical decay, Austen had lost none of her powers: “Although—or precisely because—‘Sanditon’ was composed by a dying woman, the result is robust, unsparing, and alert to all the latest fashions in human foolishness. It brims with life.” It has an uncharacteristically violent scene... Read more
At the American Interest, James S. Henry examines Trump’s Russian connections. It’s an unnerving read. Whatever his relationship with Putin, Trump “has certainly managed to accumulate direct and indirect connections with a far-flung private Russian/former Soviet Union (FSU) network of outright mobsters, oligarchs, fraudsters, and kleptocrats. Any one of these connections might have occurred at random. But the overall pattern is a veritable Star Wars bar scene of unsavory characters, with Donald Trump seated right in the middle.” Henry faults... Read more
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