Willa Cather once insisted that “a story is made out of an emotion or an excitement, and is not made out of the legs and arms and faces of one’s friends or acquaintances.” The New Republic reviewer of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather quotes this axiom, but later in the piece . . . . Continue Reading »
No poem is as note-laden as Dante’s Comedy. The glosses are absolutely necessary, but as the TLS reviewer of Clive James’s recent The Divine Comedy observes, they can get in the way: “The trouble is that the supplementary material can be as off-putting as it is notionally helpful. . . . . Continue Reading »
Malise Ruthven reviews Akbar Ahmed’s The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam at the NYRB . One of the key themes of the book is that the US has mistaken the identity of its opponents by treating them as ideologues rather than as . . . . Continue Reading »
Michael Dougherty writes to point out that many of reform movements, both Protestant and Catholic were “tragic” in the sense I use the term - that is, they were efforts to recover a pure past and to save the church from later accretions. Protestantism was born of such . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m talking about cross-Christian conversions, from Protestant to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, or the opposite. In calling such conversions “tragic,” I’m not suggesting that they always have adverse consequences for the convert. They may do, but not necessarily. In my view, . . . . Continue Reading »
A meditation on Isaiah 10 on the Trinity House site this morning. . . . . Continue Reading »
In his encyclical Quam Singulari (August 1910), the remarkable Pope Pius X comes very close to endorsing paedocommunion. He quotes the gospel passages about Jesus welcoming children, and observes that, following the example of Jesus, the church “took care even from the beginning to bring the . . . . Continue Reading »
At the end of his Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge , Raymond van Dam suggests that Constantine’s opponent, Maxentius, had his own inspiration before the battle: “During his reign Maxentius had represented himself as the defender of Rome, ‘his city.’ Perhaps it . . . . Continue Reading »
Jeremy MyNott begins his TLS review of Birds & People with this wonderful overview of ornith-anthropology: “Birds are everywhere. They span the globe from the most inhospitable regions of the Arctic and Antarctic, across oceans and seas, through desert, mountain and plain, forest and . . . . Continue Reading »
Moshe Halbertal reviews the late Ronald Dworkin’s final book, Religion without God, in The New Republic . Dworkin’s position is “religious” first in the sense that it is non-naturalist, and for this he gives, Halbertal says, two main lines of argument, moral and aesthetic. . . . . Continue Reading »
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