So, this is a moment of dialog with myself. I have been musing on Bakhtin and Dostoevsky, so the self-division seems appropriate.I have charged that Dostoevsky’s Christ is an ineffectual liberal Christ, using The Idiot as exhibit #1. But Diane Thompson’s essay on the . . . . Continue Reading »
Milbank suggests that Berkeley makes some important breakthroughs in working out a Christian understanding of language and of a creation made by the Logos (“Theological Without Substance,” Journal of Literature and Theology 2:2 [1988]). Berkeley imagines a metaphysics without . . . . Continue Reading »
In his famed “culinary triangle” (see Food and Culture: A Reader) Claude Levi-Strauss suggested a triple classification of food: raw, cooked, and rotten. Raw is the natural state; cooked is a cultural transformation of nature, and rotten is a natural transformation.Those formed the . . . . Continue Reading »
I offer a meditation on Jesus’ entry into the silence of the grave at the Trinity House site. . . . . Continue Reading »
Jezebel and her children are ostensibly the ones who are obsessed with the “deep things (bathea) of Satan” (Revelation 3:24). That fits into the letter to Thyatira in various ways.For starters, Jehu accused Jezebel of being involved in sorcery (2 Kings 9:22), and the church’s . . . . Continue Reading »
David Thomson (at TNR) thinks that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, and his legacy of acting, raises some fundamental questions about what we take as entertainment these days:“No movie actor has risked so much on despondency. This is not to say that every film star has been . . . . Continue Reading »
Philip Roth famously announced last year that he was quitting. Writing in the TLS, Adan Thirlwell suggests that what he’s actually doing is continuing his career in an inverted fashion.Thirlwell cites a 1984 interview with Hermione Lee, where Roth described his working . . . . Continue Reading »
In an essay on Dostoevsky and evil in Between Religion and Rationality, Joseph Frank observes that Dostoevsky frequently leads readers into moral horrors, but his “unflinching explorations of evil” don’t leave readers paralyzed. How does that work?Frank traces . . . . Continue Reading »
In one of his late essays in Speech Genres, Bakhtin traces the secularization of literature to the solvent effects of irony:“Irony has penetrated all languages of modern times (especially French); it has penetrated into all words and forms . . . Irony is everywhere - from the . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 1988 article in the Journal of Literature and Theology (2:1), Milbank sketches the contours of a “theology without substance.” Along the way, he offers a critique of Augustine’s signum-res distinction and the implied metaphysics.On the one hand, Augustine pours some of . . . . Continue Reading »
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