A couple of lines from Auden’s The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (W.H. Auden: Critical Editions) have been sticking with me: “Lies and lethargies police the world / In its periods of peace.” Start with the cynical substance of the lines. Lies and lethargies don’t corrupt . . . . Continue Reading »
My friend John Barach offers a further gloss on the Richard Wilbur poem I discussed here yesterday. He suggests that the final lines about the milkweed possessing the field allude to Psalm 37:9, 11: Those who wait on the Lord, the humble, inherit the land. And of course that anticipates . . . . Continue Reading »
Richard Wilbur’s “A Milkweed” has been haunting me all week. It’s a useful exercise in interpretation: Short, accessible, memorable, and profound. Today’s text: Anonymous as cherubs Over the crib of God White seeds are floating Out of my burst pod. What . . . . Continue Reading »
Boyarin again ( Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture) , 9), suggesting a linguistic paradigm for understanding the divergences and interactions between Christianity and Judaism: “Separate languages . . . are merely artifacts of . . . . Continue Reading »
Expounding on Jesus’ words about adultery in the heart (Matthew 5:27-28), John Paul II notes “a significant convergence” with as well as a “fundamental divergence” from postmodern “masters of suspicion” ( Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The . . . . Continue Reading »
In his The Lord Has Saved Me , Michael Barre points to various numerical and other patterns used in the Psalms. Barre’s discussion of the Psalm of Hezekiah (Isaiah 38) gets extremely detailed, but his introduction to the techniques of Hebrew poetry is excellent. For instance: “Several . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Habermas and Theology , Nick Adams sums up Habermas’s project as an effort to answer this question: “how can there be moral debate between members of different traditions?” Habermas’s answer, Adamss says, is “simple in conception”: “Habermas argues . . . . Continue Reading »
I summed up Gadamer’s discussion of beauty and light a few days ago, but here is Gadamer himself speaking to the subject ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , pp. 482-7). Following Aristotle and Aquinas, he argues that “‘Radiance’ . . . is not only one of the qualities of . . . . Continue Reading »
Language is a prison-house to much post-structuralist theory. Not to Gadamer. I suspect that this is related to the fact that he is comfortable with finitude. Language seems a prison-house only to those who still long for some way to escape creaturliness. Language is a prison-house only for . . . . Continue Reading »
One might characterize Gadamer’s project as one of recognizing the virtue of necessity. We cannot understand the past, he points out, without involving ourselves in it; even if we could slice ourselves from our understanding of the past then it would no longer be we who understand it. No . . . . Continue Reading »
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