Garrison Keillor gives Norman Rockwell a spirited defense in his NTYBR review of Deborah Solomon’s American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell . Rockwell, Keillor , writes, “believed that a painting was more than color and form, that it needed to carry a story ‘The story . . . . Continue Reading »
“It is not true that every writer isthe teller of one tale,” writes Adam Kirsch in his TNR review of Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books , “but it is close to being true of Roth. Again and again he stages the rebellion of desire against duty: sexual desire, most famously in the . . . . Continue Reading »
In his exhortation on the joy of the gospel , Francis I lays out several principles that should guide evangelization. The first is “Time is greater than space.” He explains, “A constant tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for complete . . . . Continue Reading »
Brian Marr begins an exploration of the revelation of the Trinity in Israel’s history over at the Trinity House site. . . . . Continue Reading »
Tocqueville ( The Ancien Rgime and the French Revolution , 16) describes the “fury” of the philosophes attack on the church: “They attacked its clergy, its hierarchy, its institutions,and its dogma, and, the better to demolish all these things, they soughtto undermine the very . . . . Continue Reading »
Diderot explains the difference between a priest and a philosophe in his “Observations sur le Nakaz” ( Political Writings , 85): “The philosophe says much against the priest; the priest says muchagainst the philosophe . But the philosophe has never killed priests, andthe priest . . . . Continue Reading »
Diderot begins his entry on “Art” in the first volume of the Encyclopedia with a brief for artisans: “Let us at last give artisans their due. The liberal arts have spentenough time singing their own praises; they could now use what voicethey have left to celebrate the mechanical . . . . Continue Reading »
In an address on the tercentenary of the Augsburg Confession, Hegel celebrated the freedom that the Lutheran Reformation brought, a freedom that healed the schism that divided the soul and the split that harmed the commonwealth ( Political Writings , 191). To highlight this liberation, he . . . . Continue Reading »
Following Husserl, Roman Jakobson insisted that linguistic sounds cannot be separated from the meaning of words. In his essay on Russian Formalism in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 8: From Formalism to Poststructuralism (24-5), Peter Steiner explains: “Edmund . . . . Continue Reading »
Throughout the Old Testament, separation and division is a moment in an act of creation. Yahweh “divides” ( badal ) this and that five times in Genesis 1. He separates and sets apart Israel from the nations (1 Kings 8:53), Levites from the rest of Israel (Numbers 8:14; 16:9), priests . . . . Continue Reading »
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