What’s so special about movies? asks Martin Scorcese in the NYRB . His answer is a mystical one: “Light is at the beginning of cinema, of course. It’s fundamental—because cinema is created with light, and it’s still best seen projected in dark rooms, where it’s . . . . Continue Reading »
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteen centuries “purists” battled with “mixturists” about language. Purists believed that languages should be purged of foreign influence and, politically, that the people of a realm should speak a single language. Mixturists reveled in the . . . . Continue Reading »
“A team from University of Darmstadt has managed to stop light for an entire minute .” To get a bit of frozen light “they took an opaque crystal and fired lasers into it to disturb the quantum states of the atoms within. By creating two quantum states within those atoms, they were . . . . Continue Reading »
The ancient Pythagorean notion of a musical universe sounds quaint today, but it was still very much a live option during the era of the scientific revolution. David Plant explains how Kepler’s laws of planetary corresponded to the intervals of music: “Kepler’s First Law states . . . . Continue Reading »
The discovery of the Cologne Mani Codex at the University of Cologne in 1969 revealed as great deal about the early history of Manichaeism. According to John Reeve’s Heralds of That Good Realm: Syro-Mesopotamian Gnosis and Jewish Traditions (6), the discovery encouraged “a dawning . . . . Continue Reading »
Numbers contains two censuses, one in chapter 1 and another in chapter 26. The total numbers are almost identical. In the first census, the count is 603,550 (1:46), while the second counts 601,730 (26;51). Israel dies in the wilderness, and Israel is reborn. But the people counted in the two . . . . Continue Reading »
Walter Burkert’s The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age and his Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture , along with ML West’s massive The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth . . . . Continue Reading »
Many have pointed to the early modern privatization of religion, with its corresponding interiorization. Guy Stroumsa ( A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason , 24-6 ) notices something else in the post-Reformation era: “To sum up the key characteristic of the . . . . Continue Reading »
The Jesuit Louis le Comte’s Nouveau memoires sur l’etat present de la Chine (1696) defended the losing Jesuit side in the “rites controversy” - the debate about whether Chinese converts were permitted to continue in ancestor worship and other traditional rites. His book was . . . . Continue Reading »
in their book on religious ceremonies, Bernard and Picart brought out similarities between Western religious practices and those found in Africa, the Americas, and the Far East. As the authors of The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (213-4) . . . . Continue Reading »
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