A TLS reviewer of Will Self’s recent Liver compares Self’s work with that of the late David Foster Wallace: “He shared with Self a willingness to experiment with genre, pastische and several other acutely artificial literary devices, as well as a sense of the grotesque, a liking . . . . Continue Reading »
With his rock star style and his intoxicating brew of high and pop culture, Zizek seems to be a paradigmatic pomo. Not so, says Terry Eagleton: “If he steals some of the postmodernists’ clothes, he has little but contempt for their multiculturalism, anti-universalism, theoretical . . . . Continue Reading »
In a largely negative review of John and Carol Garrard’s Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent ( TNR , December 31), Leon Aron notes the importance of Orthodoxy in contemporary Russian politics: “Orthodoxy is now all the rage among the Russian elite. The formerly godless KGB and Komsomol . . . . Continue Reading »
Since the patristic period, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) has been detached from its context and understood as a parable about Jews and Gentiles (Irenaeus) or about early and late conversion (Origen). Those are, I think, valid uses or applications of the parable, but . . . . Continue Reading »
Several times in her Sacred Power, Sacred Space (Oxford), Jeanne Halgren Kilde makes odd comments about the gnostic emphasis on Jesus’ humanity. Like this: “Although Gnostics had struggled mightily to emphasize Jesus’ humanity, the concept of the holy Trinity, and with it the . . . . Continue Reading »
Now here’s a wonder. In his recent The Contested Public Square (IVP), Greg Forster says that in the early centuries the church developed “a thoroughly - and irreversibly - apolitical understanding of its own existence and mission.” Irreversible, that is, until it was reversed. . . . . Continue Reading »
In the UK, they’ve got something called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. CS Lewis called it: There really is an N.I.C.E. . . . . Continue Reading »
Research for a book project has forced me to read excerpts - as little as possible - of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code . It makes for painful reading, and not only because of Brown’s stupid historical claims. The prose is bad, painfully bad. To read the book is to endure an attack - not a . . . . Continue Reading »
When the “young men” of Bethel mock Elisha, he calls out two bears that kill forty-two of them (2 Kings 2:24). Later in 2 Kings, Jehu slaughters forty-two relatives of Ahaziah of Judah during his purge of the house of Ahab (2 Kings 10:14). What’s up with that? The young men of . . . . Continue Reading »
Is another man’s government administration. The abstract to a 1981 Annales article on clientage in the late Roman empire by Paul Veyne: “In Fourth-century Rome, official posts were purchased from their holders. For officials, who were the equals of the curials and the . . . . Continue Reading »
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