Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theologyby graham ward cambridge university press, 258 pages, $54.95 The Gift of Deathby jacques derrida, translated by david wills university of chicago press, 115 pages, $18.95 Though Jacques Derrida is perhaps France’s best-known living philosopher, his . . . . Continue Reading »
The Cloister Walkby kathleen norris riverhead books, 304 pages, $23.95 I had read Norris’ previous book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, and enjoyed the way she consistently unites the exalted and the mundane, finding manifestations of the holy in the most ordinary events and objects. In The . . . . Continue Reading »
Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” complained Ralph Waldo Emerson a century and a half ago. Like his disciple and Concord neighbor Henry David Thoreau, Emerson was vexed by the ironies of modern history. Technologies of the kind that had ushered in the industrial revolution were intended . . . . Continue Reading »
The best way we can demonsrate our love for great books is ro use them in our search to discover “what we might do and . . . . Continue Reading »
In Washington, where he was to give the eighteenth Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on May 3, 1989, Walker Percy also gave an interview to Scott Walter for Crisis . This is almost exactly a year before his death, and both the interview and his lecture, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault . . . . Continue Reading »
What Joan Shelley Rubin aims to do in The Making of Middlebrow Culture is “redress the disregard and oversimplification of middlebrow culture in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s by illuminating the values and attitudes that shaped some of its major expressions.” Thus she lets us know at . . . . Continue Reading »
Those who began to study literature before the radicalization of the university in the 1970s learned that literary criticism was not only a valid undertaking in itself but a way to understand the larger culture and, indeed, the human condition in general. For a time, it seemed that just as much of . . . . Continue Reading »
In this highly individualistic age, it is probably safe to assume about every victim what Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina assumes about every unhappy family: that each is unhappy in his or her own way. This could mean that to think about victimization now is to be overwhelmed with an . . . . Continue Reading »
It is now more than thirty years since C. P. Snow’s Cambridge Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” popularized the notion of a dangerous rift between the literary and scientific world views. Snow put the blame on the pessimistic, anti-social, and politically silly . . . . Continue Reading »
Joseph Schwartz: Walker Percy's Wise AnswersIt is unfortunate that Paul Greenberg’s appreciation of Walker Percy in these pages (November 1990) should have been marred by his misreading of The Moviegoer. Greenberg has fallen into the common critical error of reading that novel as if it were . . . . Continue Reading »
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