This week we prepare for a Thanksgiving season unlike any other. Covid-time is changing the landscape for the traditional dinners and reunion–at least, for many Americans. Just in time for our holiday, a brand new book looks at the historical roots of the holiday and the founding of our nation, and how both have changed over the years. With this changing landscape of Covid-time, perhaps we can find some time to consider changing our views of a complex and distant... Read more
Anyone looking for a holiday gift for that special, hard-to-buy-for friend or family member? Or for me, for that matter?? From Micah Mattix’s Prufrock: Callaway Arts and Entertainment took hundreds of thousands of photos of the Sistine Chapel’s frescoes over two months, and it has now published them in life size in a three-volume book weighing 25 pounds and measuring 24×17 inches, which was five years in the making: “If you’re always on the hunt for limited edition photobooks and... Read more
I love to read, and perhaps you do too. Plus, I despise totalitarian dictatorships, and perhaps you do too. Is there any connection? Perhaps…. In a new book of essays on her reading adventures, titled Ex Libris, the long-time New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani mentions one of her favorites, A History of Reading (1996) by Alberto Manguel. In it, says Kakutani, “Manguel described a tenth-century Persian potentate who reportedly traveled with his 117,000-book collection loaded on the backs of... Read more
Embed from Getty Images The Humanities’ Nietzschean Degeneration In a powerful essay appearing this week in Quadrant, Luke Powell laments the rise of a Nietzschean regime among the laborers in the vineyards of the humanities–including myself, I guess. His overall analysis goes like this: a nihilistic approach to the humanities is “only the symptom of a much more problematic malady. In the West today we have abandoned the core values that put these institutions in place. Ultimately, it is our... Read more
“The tingly audacity of ‘Natural Born Killers,’ and the addictive pleasure of watching it, begins with the perception that Mickey and Mallory experience not just their infamy but every moment of their lives as pop culture. Their lives are poured through the images they carry around in their heads. The two of them enact a heightened version of a world in which identity is increasingly becoming a murky, bundled fusion of true life and media fantasy. It works something like... Read more
Embed from Getty Images OK, I’ll admit it: I do not trust almost anything coming from the White House anymore. I’ll start there. But who can we trust, anymore? I suppose for up to half of you, dear readers, I am now permanently labeled a Leftist extremist, a tenured radical, a never-Trumper fanatic. But if David Brooks is correct in his latest essay in the Atlantic, we have bigger fish to fry than just our feelings about the president or... Read more
Embed from Getty Images The latest installment of the Prufrock Newsletter (which I recommend) reports on a recent article by Alexandra Hudson in National Affairs. Hudson commemorates the 20-year anniversary of Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, one of the most influential studies of contemporary America: “Americans just aren’t doing things together anymore. By choosing to engage in activities individually rather than communally, he asserted, we were putting at risk America’s capacity to build social capital and undermining our national character... Read more
Embed from Getty Images Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his. James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone” Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon... Read more
Embed from Getty Images “It is good that you grasp one thing and also not let go of the other; for the one who fears God comes forth with both of them.” Ecclesiastes 7:18 A couple of weeks ago, our friends were at home on a typical Saturday evening in Tower Grove South, a genteel neighborhood of older homes next to one of the best parks in St. Louis. Suddenly, the normal Saturday night was shattered, along with most of... Read more
Embed from Getty Images I’m launching this blog at Patheos at the tail end of summer of 2020, which is quickly becoming one of the most distracting times of our lives. Every day brings strange, almost surreal news items. Just the other day, our president advised citizens to vote twice this fall—and more generally, he continued insinuating that the election process is fatally flawed and “rigged.” Besides the presidential election heating up, and the rising racial tensions, the whole country... Read more
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