Noel Carroll argues that anti-intentionalist structuralist criticism aims to maximize aesthetic enjoyment, at the expense of all other purposes of art and literature. This, he argues, “has a very ‘consumerist’ ring to it. In Buberesque lingo, it reduces our relation to . . . . Continue Reading »
In case you got bogged down and missed the plot, Thornton Wilder helpfully summarizes what he describes as Joyce’s “Night Book”: “We overhear and oversee [the hero] in bed above his tavern at the edge of Dublin. His conscience is trying him for some obscure . . . . Continue Reading »
In his treatise Contra Gentiles , Athanasius reproduces an argument from the Phaedrus that provides the immortality of the soul. Anything that has to be moved by something else is mortal and finite; whatever moves of itself is immortal, and immortally mobile. What is most fully mobile . . . . Continue Reading »
Adorno sees disinterestedness as a necessary stage in the development of aesthetic experience, but says that it has to be transcended by a recognition of the “interest inherent in disinterestedness.” Disinterestedness applies only to certain kinds of works, he says. Try reading . . . . Continue Reading »
Adorno writes that enjoyment is not the be-all of art. Certainly it isn’t for the producers of art: “If you ask a musician if he enjoys playing his instrument, he will probably reply: ‘I hate it’ . . . People who have a genuine relation to art would rather immerse . . . . Continue Reading »
Soteriology is eschatology, and that means soteriology has to have an already/not yet structure. Rejecting either justification by faith or judgment according to works breaks the bond of eschatology and soteriology. Another way to say this is soteriology is about what happens in . . . . Continue Reading »
Commenting on the “seal” in Song of Songs 4:12, Luther writes, “In the same way we Christians are now sealed by the Word, Baptism, and the Sacramental of the Altar, by which we are distinguished from all other races, not just before the world, but rather in God’s own . . . . Continue Reading »
In his classic essay on the “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin made some trenchant observations on the way film affects actors and audiences. Importantly, he believes these effects are not the result of some perversion of the medium of film, but . . . . Continue Reading »
Paul Niskanen has an insightful analysis of Genesis 1:27 in the latest JBL . He starts with the question of whether Barth’s view that the image of God is found in relationality and specifically in sexual difference has any exegetical support. He reviews the current discussion, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Ouch! Schaeffer again, this time on Heidegger’s interpretive methods: “Paraphrase, translation, dismantling of the syntax, making the text autonomous with regard to the concrete subject who utters it, absolute silence regarding the poetic form: to these five characteristics we . . . . Continue Reading »
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