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Sixteenth-century exchanges - November 07, 2007
Shakespeare recognized that something new was in the offing, but the actual situation of England and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was far more complicated that Timon of Athens suggests. The gift-society to which Timon is attached was...
Evangelical Reform - October 28, 2007
In 1536, nearly twenty years after Luther posted the 95 Theses on the church door at Wittenberg, Pope Paul III announced a plan to call a general council to deal with the issues raised by Luther and other Reformers. Despite...
Education Reform - October 27, 2007
"When we were boys," an editor lamented, "boys had to do a little work in school. They were not coaxed; they were hammered. Spelling, writing, and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn. In these more fortunate times,...
Patronage - October 22, 2007
Richard Saller defines patronage by three features (summarized by Griffin): "(1) it involves the reciprocal exchange of goods and services; (2) that it is a personal relationship of some duration; (3) that it is asymmetrical, in the sense that the...
Seneca and Roman Society - October 22, 2007
Miriam Griffin has a richly detailed discussion of Seneca's de Beneficiis in a 2003 issue of The Journal of Roman Studies. The article discusses the appropriateness of "patronage system" as a description of Roman social relations, Seneca's use of exaggeration...
Pointy Greeks - October 22, 2007
Seneca found Chrysippus's treatment of the Three Graces too subtle: He was a great man but "a Greek, whose intellect, too sharply pointed, is often bent and turned back upon itself; even when it seems to be in earnest it...
Illich on Hugh - October 20, 2007
Some quotations from Ivan Illich's book on Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalicon: Hugh's life coincided "with the beginning of the epoch of bookishness which is now closing," which was "a fleeting but very important moment in the history of the...
Regency Cool - September 17, 2007
In their book Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and David Robins define Cool as "an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals or small groups to express defiance to authority - whether that of the parent, the teacher, the...
It - September 16, 2007
Reviewing Joseph Roach's It in the TLS (September 7), Michael Caines cleverly sums Roach's history with: "Now it is celebrities who have two bodies: the body natural and the body cinematic." At the same time, he faults Roach for giving...
I must speak - September 15, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy finds himself "hurt, swayed, shaken, elated, disillusioned, shocked, comforted," and incapable of refraining from speech: "To write a book is no luxury. It is a means of survival." Behind Rosenstock-Huessy stands Hamann, and behind Hamann is Elihu of the...
Vico on Study Methods - September 13, 2007
It's not clear whether Vico (1668-1744) had actually read Descartes (1596-1650) directly, or how much he had read. But it is clear enough that he had read and understood the Cartesianism of his time. His response is perhaps most clearly...
From Enlightenment to Post-Modernism - September 13, 2007
Caputo argues that for Kant God fulfills a purely "regulative" function, providing the basis for an aesthetic "as if" regarding the divine regulation of the world. God also has a moral function, giving the rational demands of duty a divine,...
The Shoah and Western Civilization - September 08, 2007
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz of the Institute of World Politics analyzes the role of Holocaust revisionism in the Islamic assault on the West: "The terrible, if unstated, implications of the anti-Jewish logic of the Islamists are clear. For them, the Holocaust...
Time and Social Theory - September 03, 2007
In her critical study of sociology's understanding of time, Barbara Adam contrasts the multiform experience of time in life with the much thinner understanding of time in theory: "In everyday life . . . time can mean a variety of...
Wordsworth and the Picturesque - August 27, 2007
According to a 1964 article in Modern Philology by John Nabholtz, Wordsworth intended his Guide to the Lakes (first published in 1810; fifth edition in 1835) as a corrective to picturesque writers like Gilpin. He intended his book to model...
English Gesellschaft - August 27, 2007
In an 1817 letter, Wordsworth complained to Daniel Stuart, "I see clearly that the principal ties which kept the different classes of society in a vital and harmonious dependence upon each other have, within these thirty years, either been greatly...
Gilpin and the Lakes - August 27, 2007
If Repton created the scenery that resonated with Romantics, William Gilpin was the one who put the Lake Country on the map. Travel writer and theorist of the picturesque, Gilpin was the writer most responsible for the 18th-century enthusiasm for...
Repton and Romanticism - August 27, 2007
A mania for "improvements" gripped the upwardly mobile land-owning classes of the 18th century. By the end of the century, the landscape styles of Lancelot "Capability" Brown were in decline. Richard Payne Knight put the objections to Brownian style in...
Visionary city planning - August 22, 2007
Europeans saw the conquest of the Americas as a new Canaanite conquest. Once they subdued the land, what else would they do but build a temple. According to Hamblin and Seely, "Spanish missionary Toribio de Motolinia (d. 1568), for example,...
Khazar tabernacle - August 22, 2007
Around 960, Joseph, Qaghan of the Khazars, wrote a letter explaining how his ancestor, Bulan, received the commission to build a tabernacle: "The angel appeared to him again, and said, 'My son, the heavens and earth cannot contain me. Nevertheless,...
Temple and church - August 22, 2007
Hamblin and Seely also describe in some detail the impact of Solomon's temple on Christian architecture. Eusbius describes the consecration of a church in Tyre that picks up on multiple temple-related themes: "The bishop-builder is compared with Bezalel, Solomon, and...
Slavery and self-interest - August 20, 2007
During his 1842 tour of the US, Charles Dickens met a southerner who tried to convince him that harsh treatment of slaves was against the self-interest of Southern slaveholders. Dickens's response was devastating: "I told him quietly that it was...
Painting and landscape - August 17, 2007
Following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, young English noblemen began traveling the continent in what became known as the Grand Tour. Along the way, the came across Italian landscape painters, and went home dreaming of turning England into little...
Enclosure and landscape - August 17, 2007
Most of England's enclosure acts were passed between 1760 and 1815, and the acts transformed the British landscape. Before enclosure, yeoman farmers lived in villages, and trudged each day to their scattered strips of land to work. Before enclosure, according...
From ascribed to attributed celebrity - August 16, 2007
Rojek again: He claims that the story of celebrity over the past two centuries has been a shift from ascribed (hereditary) to attributed celebrity. Though some achieved international fame in earlier times, "they were always under strong pressures to conform...
Cool - August 16, 2007
In their book, Cool Rules, Dick Pountain and David Robins define cool as "a permanent state of private rebellion," one which "conceals its rebellion behind an ironic impassivity."...
Two Hermeticisms - August 01, 2007
It is often thought that Hermeticism faded during the Christian Middle Ages, to be revived in the 15th century with Ficino's translation of the Corpus Hermeticum. One of the central claims of Florian Ebeling's The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus...
It - August 01, 2007
Some people fascinate. Some people have "It." But what is It? Yale theater professor Joseph Roach explores this question in his wide-ranging cultural history, entitled simply It (University of Michigan, 2007). Turns out, It is like porn - you know...
Petrification of the church - July 30, 2007
In his recent La Maison Dieu, Dominique Iogna-Prat asks "How did the Church, in the sense of the community of the faithful, come to take its identity from space bounded by stones." In the words of the TLS reviewer, Iogna-Prat...
Longing for myth - July 12, 2007
George Williamson argues in Longing for Myth in Germany (Chicago, 2004) that the search for a "new mythology" developed from "the postrevolutionary experience of historical rupture and religious crisis." Nationalist writers gave a particular spin to this by calling for...
Forced ecumenism - July 05, 2007
During the 19th century, various European states forcibly united divided churches. A similar thing happened in Zaire in 1970. Mbiti writes, "the Eglise du Christ au Zaire . . . brought together Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Disciples and a host of...
Exporting schism - July 05, 2007
Mbiti tells a disheartening story about an effort to unite Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Moravians in Kenya and Tanzania. At a 1965 meeting that lasted several days, the group had come to agreement on all the issues that had...
Museums or churches? - July 03, 2007
Mbiti laments that often "African Christians feel terribly foreign within the doors of the churches to which we belong. Lutheran missionaries have made us more Lutheran than the Germans; Roman Catholic missionaries have made us feel and behave more Roman...
Next Christendom - July 03, 2007
Mbiti's vision of the impact of the gospel on culture justifies Philip Jenkins's description of Southern Hemisphere Christianity as "the next Christendom." For Mbiti, Christianity is "a total way of life, a world view, a religious ideology (if one may...
Simeon and Levi - July 02, 2007
The history of conversos, Jews forced to convert to Christianity, is filled with horrific tragedy and irony. In 1506 in Lisbon, Christians played Simeon and Levi to "Shechemite" Jews (cf. Genesis 34) as mobs slaughtered a couple of thousand conversos....
Suffering Messiah - July 02, 2007
In 1665, one Sabbatai Tsevi of Smyrna announced himself to the world as a Kabbalistic messiah who would bring in the final restoration (tiqqun). Yet, a year later, under a threat of execution from the sultan of Turkey, Tsevi converted...
No heavenly good - June 25, 2007
Alcinous, a pagan philosopher of the second century AD claimed that God is "eternal, ineffable, self-sufficient, without need . . . and perfect in every respect." The only way to know such a God was to ascend from earthly things...
Roman Moses - June 16, 2007
Suetonius records that Augustus escaped a threat of death as an infant. A portent convinced the Romans that a king was about to be born, and in response the Senate planned to ban the rearing of male children for a...
Birth - June 08, 2007
According to Tina Cassidy's recent Birth: A History, birth has been (in the words of the TLS reviewer) a "ripe terrain for fads" and "oftne a vigilante affair." Not all the fads have been New Ageish; some have been scientific....
Muscular Christianity and American Sport - June 01, 2007
A few fragments from another project. On October 16, 1869, Charles W. Eliot gave his inaugural address as he took over the post of President of Harvard. It was "one of the greatest addresses in modern educational history, delivered with...
Rites Controversy - May 11, 2007
During the seventeenth century, the church grew rapidly in China. According to Chan Kei Thong, "In 1640, three decades after [Matteo] Ricci died, there were 60,000 to 70,000 Catholic converts; by 1651, their numbers had more than doubled to 150,000....
True Kingship - May 11, 2007
During the reign of Tang, the founder of the Shang Dynasty (1766 B.C.), China suffered a seven-year drought. Someone suggested that a human sacrifice was necessary. Chan Kei Thong tells the story: "Tang appointed a day for this to be...
Chinese and Hebraic thought - May 11, 2007
In his fascinating Faith of Our Fathers, Chan Kei Thong points to many biblical images embedded in Chinese characters. His argument could be made even stronger by looking at Hebrew terminology. For instance, he says of the character "zui," which...
Chinese Creation - May 11, 2007
At the beginning of the Great Sacrifice performed by the Chinese emperor for centuries, singers sang the song of creation, addressed to the "Sovereign Lord" known as "Shang Di": "Of old in the beginning, there was the great chaos, without...
Bos and Bobos - May 08, 2007
According to Adolf Loos, a turn of the 20th-century Viennese architect and critic, modern style combines beauty and practicality. Both are necessary: "By beautiful, what we mean is that something has achieved fullness, completion. But no useless, impractical object can...
Wisdom literature - May 02, 2007
Jenkins comments a number of times on the prominence of Old Testament Wisdom literature and James in Southern Christianity. He notes that these books have been particularly important as inter-religious texts. The Galai Lama "provided an admiring introduction" for the...
Exploratory and standard theology - April 25, 2007
In a thoughtful review of Fergus Kerr's recent book on Twentieth-century Catholic theology (First Things, May), Rusty Reno discusses the distinction between exploratory and standard theology. The "Heroic Generation" prior to Vatican II (Congar, de Lubac, Rahner, Lonergan, and others)...
Equality and fashion - April 02, 2007
In 1767, one N. Foster wrote, "In England the several ranks of men slide into each other almost imperceptibly, and a spirit of equality runs through every part of their constitution. Hence arises a strong emulation in all the several...
Consumer revolution - April 02, 2007
In the 1982 symposium, The Birh of a Consumer Society, Neil McKendrick identifies some of the chief features of the demand-side of the social and economic of the 18th century. What did it mean for England to become a "consumer...
Mimetic adverts - April 02, 2007
Samuel Johnson recognized the character of avertising quite early. he noted in 1761 that "advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by...
Early advertising - April 02, 2007
Seen in the advertising section of many 18th-century English newspapers: "a fine young breast of milk willing to enter a gentleman’s household." Presumably attached to a wet nurse. And an advertisement for a bed that "at the head . ....
Converted Jerusalem Revisited - April 01, 2007
A number of readers have been skeptical about my earlier post on converted Jerusalem. Several have noted that Rodney Stark's population statistics for Jerusalem don't fit well with information we get from Josephus, who claims that the population of Jerusalem...
Converted Jerusalem - March 30, 2007
In his fascinating Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark cites estimates that there were between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants of Jerusalem in the first century. Stark uses this to falsify Luke's claims that there were 5000 Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 4:4)...
Hospitality - March 24, 2007
For us, hospitality usually means entertaining. It means having our friends and neighbors and church members into the home. Sometimes, in our world, it involves jockeying for position and power by showing hospitality to the right kinds of people. That's...
The Alexandrian West - March 21, 2007
In her book on medieval Bible scholarship, Beryl Smalley notes that "Alexandrian exegesis penetrated to the Latin middle ages, when knowledge of Greek had declined, by two main channels: indirectly through the Latin Fathers and directly through translations of Origen's...
Europe - March 16, 2007
My friend Peter Roise has repeatedly encouraged me to read the work of the Asia Times Online columnist who writes under the pseudonym "Spengler." I'm glad he has, because Spengler is well worth reading. He writes with a historical awareness...
Quantifiable love - March 13, 2007
In his Inquiry into the original of our ideas of Beauty and Virtue, the Irish Presbyterian moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson suggested an equation for calculating love: "The Quantity of Love toward any person is in a compound Proportion of the...
Urban Goggles - March 01, 2007
This paper is an exploration of the modern urban situation, how it differs from the older cities, and the challenges modern urban/suburban civilization poses for Christianity. All of America, ERH claims, is urbanized by industry, which removes the barriers between...
American Revolution - February 22, 2007
Was the American Revolution a Revolution? ERH concludes it was a "half-revolution" rather than a total revolution on the scale of the Russian, French, Puritan, Reformation, and Papal revolutions. Evaluating the revolutionary character of the American Revolution rests partly on...
Language decline? - February 22, 2007
Electronic communication is supposed to be destroying our ability to use normal language, as we resort to various forms of shorthand - BTW, FWIW, LOL, ROFLOL, etc, etc. Well maybe. But if it's a sign of linguistic decline, it's not...
Interim America - February 21, 2007
"Interim America" is Rosenstock-Huessy's name for the American order during the period between 1890-1940. This is an "interim" because it is not a stable order, but a transition between the old and the new. This interim period is ordered by...
God bows out - February 20, 2007
Why did the Reformation happen? Luther once said, "God threw the cards on the table and refused to play the game any longer."...
Sacred/Secular and the Triumph of Lent - February 17, 2007
In his history of popular culture in early modern Europe, Peter Burke traces what he describes as the "triumph of Lent" during the 17th and 18th centuries. He refers to Brueghel's painting, Combat of Carnival and Lent and says, "I...
Papal Revolution - February 15, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy says that the Papal revolution led by Gregory VII was the first total revolution It was a mutiny against the papacy's defense on the palace: "The papacy cut the direct and domestic relation between throne and altar in every...
German Universities - February 08, 2007
Rosentock-Huessy's discussion of German universities is closely linked to his treatment of the Reformation. The universities took on prominence during the Reformation because the princes of various German territories had to find some authoritative voice to judge in religious matters....
German Reformation - February 08, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy's discussion of Luther makes sense if we recall what ERH says about the unique origins of a human type and the repetition of a human type. Luther's biography is not just about his contribution to the Reformation; ERH says...
Democratized sociology - February 01, 2007
Sociologists have known for a long time about the social constraints on knowledge, ethics, beliefs. It's the sociologist's stock in trade. What we have witnessed in the past couple of decades is the democratization of sociology. Now everyone's a sociologist,...
Common Law - February 01, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy emphasizes the importance of the Chancery for the functioning of English Common Law and the integration of England into the realm of Christendom. Chancery was instituted as a counter-balance, in a sense, to Parliament. During the middle ages, Parliament...
Isidore of Seville - January 29, 2007
In case you need yet another reason to search for Isidore, he has recently been proposed as the "patron saint of the Internet." And for those without the cash to buy the recent translation of Isidore's Etymologies (advertized here some...
Paris and French Nationhood - January 25, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy deals with a number of interrelated issues in a section of Out of Revolution dealing with Paris and the French notion of nationhood: He talks about the establishment of Paris as the intellectual center of France and of Europe;...
Tribalism - January 18, 2007
To grasp what Rosenstock-Huessy says about tribalism, we need to recognize that he sees the tribe as one moment in the development of ancient civilization. In The Fruit of Lips, he describes the origin of the tribe: "The ancient cycle...
Secularism and suffering - January 17, 2007
Talal Asad suggests that secularism assumes that human beings live and choose on the basis of a "calculus of pleasure and pain." Pain is unredeemable, and so secularism can respond to suffering only by trying to minimize it - soothing...
Ex cathedra - January 12, 2007
When Frederick the Elector of Saxony protected Luther from church and imperial authorities, it was not as a personal friend but to protect the rights of the university faculty to exercise censorship in religious matters. The Reformation thus planted the...
Feminism's prehistory - January 12, 2007
In France, women have played a prominent political role through their involvement with the salons. To rise in society, one needed to please the women who served as guardians of the salons; and to rise politically one needed to rise...
Chiastic history - January 12, 2007
Hobbes called it a "circular motion of the sovereign power," but what he actually described in summarizing the Revolutionary-Restoration sequence was a chiasm: "it moved from King Charles I to the Long Parliament; from thence to the Rump; from the...
Restorations and Rebellions - January 12, 2007
Cromwell and his co-belligerents claimed to be aiming for the restoration of English liberties; they did not consider themselves rebels. Yet, in much English historiography, the Puritan Revolution goes down as the "Great Rebellion," the term "restoration" having been snagged...
End of Christian Europe - January 10, 2007
When the constitutional treaty for the European Union deleted references to Europe's Christian heritage, many quite rightly protested this remarkable act of self-induced amnesia. But it was really old news. From the time of the French Revolution, "Europe" was redefined,...
Lutheran v. Calvinist - January 10, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy points out, "For two hundred years the Lutheran patricians in Frankfurt had prevented even their Calvinist competitors from living in the city. Not until 1780, nine years before the conquest of the Bastille, did the Calvinist merchants get permission...
Secularization of language - January 10, 2007
In a 1980 article in the Journal of the History of Ideas Margret de Grazia helpfully described what she calls the "secularization of language" that occurred during the 17th century. Her contribution is to show that the often-noted "linguistic pessimism"...
Resurrected texts - January 05, 2007
When the young Yves Congar visited Lutheran theologians and pastors in Germany in 1930, he learned that Lutheran perceptions of Catholicism were largely shaped by Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, of which Congar had never heard. Today, it would be impossible for...
History of purity - January 03, 2007
Gadamer says, "One day someone should write the history of 'purity.'" He cites one H. Sedlmayr, who "refers to Calvinistic purism and the deism of the Enlightenment." Kant would play a key role: He "linked himself directly with the classical...
Unintended consequences - January 03, 2007
In 1439, representatives of Eastern and Western churches met in Florence to heal the schism of 1054. An agreement was reached, but it remained a paper agreement only. But the event had enormous consequences for the future of the Western...
St. Abraham - January 03, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy strikingly sees the spirit of Francis in the person of Abraham Lincoln: "When Lincoln, as President and Commander-in-Chief of a victorious army, walked into Richmond in 1865, on foot, without escort, St. Francis had conquered the powers of this...
Reformation of gift - January 02, 2007
Natalie Zelmon Davis writes, "In a profound sense, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century were a quarrel about gifts, that is, about whether humans can reciprocate to God, about whether humans can put God under obligation, and about what...
Exorcising the family - January 02, 2007
The Protestant Reformation had well-known effects on the nuclear family, but Rosenstock-Huessy notes that a parallel movement occurred in the Roman Catholic church after 1500, when Catholics began to "lay far more stress on the cult of St. Joseph and...
Childbirth again - January 02, 2007
In The Christian Future, Rosenstock-Huessy again makes some passing comments about childbirth. He is talking about the character of suburban life, its ethnic and economic uniformity, its placid and indifferent external peacefulness that hides, he claims, desperate inner conflicts. For...
Allegory and the West - December 29, 2006
Gadamer traces the development of the notion of symbol and the corresponding, and contemporaneous, devaluation of allegory. Allegory came to be identified with "non-art" as experiential-expressive notions of art and poetry developed in post-Kantian romanticism. Along the way, he notes...
Revolutionary timing - December 29, 2006
Are we living in a time of world-revolutionary change? Impossible to say, of course, but there might be some hints contained in the developments of the last millennium. Rosenstock-Huessy notes that Western man has been formed by periodic world-historical revolutions...
One world - December 29, 2006
William Cavanaugh suggests that globalization represents a false catholicity, a unification of the human race organized around consumption and Hollywood blockbusters. That's certainly one legitimate angle. On the other hand: The wealth of the wicked is stored up for the...
Fallen Soldiers - December 28, 2006
George L. Mosse's Fallen Soldiers (Oxford 1990) is a fascinating study of the "Myth of War Experience" that developed between the French Revolution and came to a climax in World War I and its aftermath. Mosse develops a number of...
Naming and nationalism - December 28, 2006
With nationalism at its height in the nineteenth century, the common practice of giving children biblical names was a check on nationalist idolatry, a reminder that the child was part of Christendom, not merely of France, Germany, England, etc. Rosenstock-Huessy...
Mysticism and culture - December 26, 2006
Gadamer notes that the concept of Bildung (culture) has its origins in medieval and baroque mysticism, and continues to carry a mystical connotation when it begins to be used of the cultivated humanness. Von Humboldt, for instance, says "when in...
A Christian Vice? - December 19, 2006
In a 1917 article, Joseph William Hewitt notes that the Greeks did not view ingratitude with the same horror as modern writers (among modern writers, he lists Thomas Elyot, Shakespeare, and the Spectator). From the sixteenth century to the early...
Rejoinders - December 19, 2006
Kenneth Burke wisely remarks that "Every document bequeathed us by history must be treated as a strategy for encompassing a situation," an "answer or rejoinder to assertions current in the situation in which it arose." He goes on to compare...
Old Stone Gods - December 16, 2006
In 1834, Heinrich Heine had predicted a revival of Germany that was not dependent on Christianity but on a return to the savage roots of German character: "Christianity, and this is its greatest merit, has occasionally calmed the brutal German...
German Pentecost - December 16, 2006
1914 brought unity to a previously divided Germany. One pastor in Hanover wrote, "When the day of mobilisation had fully come, there were Germans all together in unity - villagers and city dwellers, conservatives and freethinkers, Social Democrats and Alsatians,...
More from Latour - November 16, 2006
A few further scattered comments from and on Latour. 1) He disputes the notion that the modern world is disenchanted, claiming that the claim of disenchantment is merely the reflex of the Constitution of modernity and its premise that We...
Purity - November 15, 2006
No doubt it goes without saying after the previous few posts, but Latour's anthropological assessment of modernity provides a lot of ammo for a study of modernity that would treat it as the creation of a purity culture, as dirt-avoidance....
Semi-modernism - November 15, 2006
Postmoderns, Latour suggests, think they are still modern, but in fact they have greatly oversimplified the modern Constitution. Postmoderns might emphasize the separation of subject and world, and stretch that opposition to a breaking point (Latour vividly describes them as...
Modern temporality - November 15, 2006
In his very good section on modern temporality, Latour argues that modernity assumes that everything in the present, modern moment, is purely modern, novel. Anything that appears that is not up-to-date is a "archaism," and moderns worry constantly that this...
Representation - November 15, 2006
One of the key moves made since the 17th century, Latour argues, is a distinction between modes of "representation." In the laboratory Boyle is representing things before selected witnesses through scientific experiments, giving mute nature a voice through the scientist,...
We Have Never Been Modern - November 15, 2006
Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard 1993) is a rich study. He describes modernity in terms of a dual process of "purification" and "hybridization." Purification involves the clean construction of a nature (and science) separated off from society...
Postmodernism = Globalism - November 09, 2006
Walter Truett Anderson says, "The postmodern condition is not an artistic movement or a cultural fad or an intellectual theory - although it produces all of those and is in some ways defined by them. It is what inevitably happens...
Pseudo-war - November 09, 2006
Walter Truett Anderson points to the US invasion of Grenada (1983) as an example of a postmodern public-relations war: "its primary purpose was to give the American public a 'win,' to flex the muscles of the Reagan administration, to allow...
Social Construction - November 08, 2006
Walter Truett Anderson suggests that postmodernism takes is rise from the recognition of the social construction of reality. This means: The institutions, practices, and habits that make up the contents of social life are made by human beings; and even...
Ethnicity - November 07, 2006
Ethnic identity politics, Eric Hobsbawm argues, arises as an effort to established impermeable boundaries in a situation where boundaries are permeable: "The very fluidity of ethnicity in urban societies made its choice as the only criterion of the group arbitrary...
Universal exile - November 07, 2006
Ancient politics had to do with governing a people set in a particular location; so did the modern politics of the nation-state. With the large-scale population movements of the last half-century, the ethnic homogeneity of the nation-state (never entirely homogenous...
World Citizens - November 07, 2006
Political scientist David Jacobson notes the connection between immigration and shifts in understandings of rights: "Transnational migration is steadily eroding the traditional basis of nation-state membership, namely citizenship. As rights have come to be predicated on residency, not citizen state,...
Artificial selves - November 07, 2006
Discussions of the postmodern self often trace a genealogy from Descartes to Locke to Kant to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Foucault. But though philosophers no doubt have some influence on the daily experiences of normal humans, this sort of treatment...
End of history - November 07, 2006
Evidence that Fukuyama may have had it right: Walter Truett Anderson writes that "the International Commission on Peace and Food (in its 1994 report) pointed to the urgent need to create employment for hundreds of millions of poor people, and...
We're All Communitarians now - November 07, 2006
Psychologist Brewster Smith decries the solvents of postmodern life - cynicism, shallowness, sensationalism, warfare between fundamentalisms and relativisms, uncertainty about all standards, the "fin de siecle sense of drift and doom" (even after the fin). What's his solution? Find yourself...
Pro Patria Mori - November 06, 2006
The history of the modern nation-state, and the disillusionment with it, can be told as the story of changing responses to Roman-inspired patriotism, tinged with the rhetoric of Christian martyrdom and sacrifice. Simplifying to an extreme, the story of modern...
Other-directeds and Decentereds - November 06, 2006
In his 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, David Reisman divided humanity into three parts: the tradition-directed, the inner-directed, and the other-directed. The last were distinguished from the first by the fact that they looked to the present rather than to...
Solitude and individualism - November 06, 2006
Is solitide a prerequisite for the rise of individualism? If someone is never actually alone, can he ever conceive of himself as being defined in isolation and separation from others? This line of questioning might give some part of the...
Foucault's eschatology - November 04, 2006
Berman offers this very sharp summary of Foucault's work, whom he says is "about the only writer of the past decade who has had anything substantial to say about modernity" (Berman is writing in 1982). Then: "what he has to...
Flattened modernity - November 04, 2006
In the introduction to his All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman argues that nineteenth century critics of modernity had a much richer grasp of the costs and promise of modernity than do twentieth century observers. Modern life...
Religious Liberty and the Whig Interpretation - November 03, 2006
The following is a portion of a lecture at the NSA disputatio. WHIGGISH HISTORY The Whigs were of course a loose British political alliance, the predecessor of today's Liberal Democrats. The term was first applied, interestingly, to the Scottish Covenanters...
World Cities again - November 02, 2006
Thinking again about Mike Featherstone's comments on the fact that multiculturalism developed first in Southern Hemisphere cities (quoted in a post from September 2006), it strikes me that one of the dynamics of the current global situation is a reversal...
Mass culture - November 02, 2006
The point of theories of "mass culture" is not so much the "mass" as the "culture." Goods and services may be distributed to a large number of people in economies where what is called "mass culture" doesn't exist. When theorists...
Hyperreal - November 02, 2006
Baudrillard sounds like a nut when he says that we are now living in a hyperreal world, a virtual world. But there is certainly something to it. We're still physical creatures, of course, surrounded by physical objects, and that doesn't...
Community of the fearful - November 01, 2006
Postmodernity unleashes fear, Bauman says: "Modernity was a continuous and uncompromising effort to fill or to cover up the void; the modern mentality held a stern belief that the job can be done - if not today then tomorrow. The...
Chronopolitics - November 01, 2006
Johannes Fabian argues in his Time and the Other that "geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics." Bauman summarizes the argument: "The modern perspective 'denied coevality' to any form of life different from its own; it construed the Other of...
Slavery in America - October 31, 2006
In his recent history of slavery in the New World, David Brion Davis records some surprising facts about American slavery. Prior to 1820, for instance, African slaves were more numerous than European settlers by a ratio of 5 to 1....
Legitimacy of modernity - October 19, 2006
Modernity arose to tame the chaos and carnage of 16th and 17th-century European wars. To form a Europe reduced to formlessness, modern thinkers and politicians drew boundaries - the boundaries between Protestant and Catholic established in the Peace of Westphalia...
High and Low Theater - October 18, 2006
Katherine Newey suggests that "a class-based divide between popular culture and literary or 'high,' remaining to this day, emerged in debates over the reform of the theatre [in the 19th century]. Much of what still endures of the concept of...
Shakespeare's audience - October 18, 2006
Arthur F. Kinney writes that "Until very recently - and in some scholarly circles still today - it has been argued that the working class - the journeymen, apprentices, and men and women servants sometimes known as subalterns - had...
Revolution and Papal Supremacy - October 17, 2006
Michael Burleigh details the decimation of the bishoprics and clergy in Franch during the Revolution. This had the unintended consequence of raising the profile of the Pope: Without local or regional authorities to look to, the remaining French clergy looked...
Barnum's opera - October 17, 2006
Levine: "In 1853 Putnam's Magazine had proposed that P. T. Barnum . . . be named the manager of New York's Opera. 'He understands what our public wants, and how to gratify that want. He has no foreign antecedents. He...
Popular opera - October 17, 2006
In his Highbrow/Lowbrow, Lawrence Levine writes that "it is hard to exaggerate the ubiquity of operatic music in nineteenth-century America. In 1861 a band played music from Rigoletto to accompany the inauguration of President Lincoln. In the midst of the...
Urban pigs - October 14, 2006
Stallybrass and White again: "increasingly from the sixteenth century pigs were present and high visible in the city. They wandered through the streets, sometimes biting and even killing small children: in 1608 the young Sir Hugh Cholmley was attacked by...
Civilized savages - October 14, 2006
After a survey of the exotica on display in fairs in the 18th-19th centuries, Stallybrass and White conclude that the fairs do not, as Bakhtin argued, enact a grotesque inversion of civilized hierarchies, but instead reinforce those very hierarchies. Two...
Smokin' like a Christian - October 14, 2006
English fairs in earlier centuries displayed wares and displays from all over the world. At one there was an animal described as "a noble creature, which much resembled a Wild Hairy man" whose main skill was to doff his hat...
Sports and the sacred - October 14, 2006
A reader wrote to respond to my suggestion that high culture is "sacred" and pop culture "profane," citing the example of sports. Here's my response: A football game often is a quasi-religious experience, but I'm not sure we use the...
Civil war and criticism - October 13, 2006
As Marsden describes it, the growth of neoclassical literary sensibilities developed in part in reaction to the chaos and disorder of the English civil war - following in this regard the development of late 17th century political theory. Orderliness, definiteness,...
From performance to text - October 13, 2006
Marsden again: "The rise and fall of the adaptations . . . represents a pivotal moment in literary and cultural history, testifying to the new focus on language which would soon infiltrate all aspects of eighteenth-century thought. When concern for...
Sacred culture - October 13, 2006
In a study of adaptations of Shakespeare in the 17th and 18th century, Jean Marsden argues that there was an inversion in the approach to Shakespeare sometime in the 18th century. Prior to that time, Shakespeare's words were changed and...
Shakespeare and Civilizing Process - October 13, 2006
Notes for my lecture at the upcoming Moscow Ministerial Conference. INTRODUCTION I was assigned a lecture on Shakespeare and pop culture, and I'm almost going to do that. Not that Shakespeare and pop culture is an irrelevancy. There are a...
Political religion - October 11, 2006
Few have said it with the forthrightness of Joseph II, the Habsburg emperor from 1780 to 1790, who justified his 1781 Edict of Toleration because "with freedom of religion, one religion will remain, that of guiding all citizens alike to...
Enthusiasts of reason - October 11, 2006
Since Carl Becker's book on the heavenly city of the philosophes, historians have recognized that the Enlightenment was motivated, by a secularized version of the biblical story - a fall from the Golden Age of the classical world into the...
Cleric and Philosophe - October 11, 2006
Battle lines are never, in reality, as clean as we see them in retrospect. Some 700 of the 20,000 freemasons in pre-Revolutionary France were Catholic clergy, and Michael Burleigh reports that "revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, clergy and laity shared a taste...
Science of Individual - October 11, 2006
One aspect of the rise of "discipline" that Foucault traces is the development of what he calls the sciences of the individual. These are dependent upon the development of a network of techniques of gathering and recording information - "the...
Marx and New Left - October 10, 2006
Kolakowski describes the New Left revolution of the 60s as an "explosion of academic youth" and "an aggressive movement born of frustration." It "easily created a vocabulary for itself out of Marxist slogans, or some expressions from the Marxist story:...
What counts as history? - October 10, 2006
Marx (German Ideology, 1845-46) objected to historians of the past for what they left out of history. The first presumption of historical study, he suggested, is "human existence," which means that "men must be in a position to live in...
Courtship and American culture - October 07, 2006
In a widely cited article, Leon Kass offers a partial, but still numbing, list of the social and cultural changes that have undermined traditional courtship: "the sexual revolution, made possible especially by effective female contraception; the ideology of feminism and...
Chivalry - October 06, 2006
CS Lewis pointed out that the critical thing about chivalry was "the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged...
Classical bodies and modernity - September 28, 2006
Stallybrass and White again: The classical form "was far more than an aesthetic standard or model." It might be better to say that there was a classicist aesthetic at work in other areas besides art. In any case, the classical...
The Good Old Days... - September 26, 2006
when the theater was taken seriously. Douglas Lanier writes, "On may 7 [1849] Edwin Forrest and William Macready, long-time Shakespearian rivals, mounted competing productions of Macbeth in New York City, Forrest at the Broadway Theater, Macready at the Astor Place...
Table Manners and Individualism - September 25, 2006
Elias notes that table manners reflect social relations more generally: "People who ate together in the way customary in the Middle Ages, taking meat with their fingers from the same dish, wine from the same goblet, soup from the same...
The Blasphemous Fork - September 25, 2006
Elias again: "In the eleventh century a Venetian doge married a Greek princess. In her Byzantine circle the fork was clearly in use. At any rate, we hear that she lifted food to her mouth 'by means of little gold...
Middle Class Counter-Enlightenment - September 25, 2006
Elias suggests that the blossoming of German literature in the late 18th century was largely led by middle-class writers and thinkers whose tastes and styles ran directly counter to the Francophile culture of Frederick's court: "This German literary movement, whose...
Mad Hatter's Tea - September 21, 2006
At the Retreat organized by the asylum reformer Samuel Tuke, the inmates would occasionally enjoy social occasions where the rules of etiquette would be strictly observed. In Tuke's own description, they would "dress in their best clothes, and vie with...
Descartes's exorcism - September 20, 2006
Madness in what Foucault calls the "classical period" is conceived as a dazzlement - the madman is darkened with excessive light. In this context, "the Cartesian formula of doubt is certainly the great exorcism of madness. Descartes closes his eyes...
Divine madness - September 20, 2006
For the Renaissance, Foucault argues, the line between madness and reason was thin and easily crossed. The madman, in fact, frequently gained insight that the sane did not; think Lear howling on the heath. Over time, madness and truth had...
Enlightenment and Dehellenization - September 19, 2006
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno characterize the Enlightenment assault on metaphysics as an assault on the remnants of old superstition. Among the Greeks, "by means of the Platonic ideas, even the patriarchal gods of Olympus were absorbed in...
Hobbes and the Priests - September 19, 2006
In their study of Hobbes and Boyle, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer show that Hobbes's opposition to Boyle's air pump was as political as scientific. Hobbes complained about the Catholic system because it introduced a double loyalty to church and...
Fart club - September 18, 2006
We think our popular culture is as crass as it comes, but in 18th century London, in Cripplegate, there was a fart club, where, as Kenneth Baker says, "the members met once a month to give of their best." The...
World Cities - September 14, 2006
Featherstone: "One important site where the various flows of people, goods, technology, information and images cross and intermingle is the world city. World cities are the sites in which we find the juxtaposition of the rich and the poor, the...
Modernist postmoderns - September 13, 2006
Postmodern critics of modernity sometimes treat the latter not only as the pursuit and ambition for totality; they treat it as a totality, as an undifferentiated whole. But if postmoderns are right, even modernity was fragmented and frayed at the...
Modernity and dirt - September 13, 2006
A subsidiary thesis: Modernity is motivated by a desire for purity, by dirt-avoidance - dirt being, as Mary Douglas says, "matter out of place." Counter-modernity is dirt's revenge, celebration of dirt....
Modernity as court culture - September 13, 2006
Featherstone once again. He points out that sometime in the 18th century, upper class culture divided from lower class culture: "in 1500 the educated strata despised the common people although they shared their culture. Yet by 1800 their descendants had...
Romantic ethic and Consumption - September 12, 2006
In his 1987 book, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, C. Campbell attempts to explain the origins of contemporary obsession with novelty, pleasure in the new, self-expression through consumption of goods. He traces it to romanticism's focus...
Consumption, Body, and the Sacred - September 12, 2006
A couple of further notes from Featherstone's very stimulating book. First, citing Pierre Bourdieu, he notes the limits of seeing consumption as an isolated marker of status. The signs "that betray a person's origins and trajectory through life are manifest...
Elites and the Market - September 12, 2006
Cultural elites have, Featherstone suggests, an inherently ambivalent relationship with the market. His argument, if I understand it, goes something like this: Cultural elites want to preserve a monopolization of cultural products. Hence, for instance, peer review of scholarly work;...
McDonald's and Postmodernity - September 12, 2006
McDonald's provides a helpful glimpse at the complexities surrounding postmodernity. On the one hand, the global reach of McDonald's seems a perfect illustration of one part of the postmodern situation - the global diffusion of American culture and tastes, the...
Postmodernism and Globalization - September 12, 2006
Though often conceived as a crisis within Western civilization, postmodernism, Featherstone argues, is partly impelled by globalization. Globalization, he begins, usually conveys two images - the spread of a single, increasingly uniform culture throughout the world, and the "compression" or...
Consumer Culture and Fragmentation - September 12, 2006
Culture, Mike Featherstone suggests in Undoing Culture, becomes problematic in consumer societies. How? As developed in cultural anthropology, culture is "somehow homologous to the distinctions, differences, and divisions between social groups who unconsciously use culture as relatively fixed markers in...
Globalization - September 07, 2006
Globalization is the unification of cultures, the formation of the many cultures of the world into a single, global culture. This is facilitated, obviously, by communications technologies, the worldwide spread of media, entertainment, and advertizing, and by the restructuring of...
Enlightenment and the Gothic - September 07, 2006
Enlightenment was not only a movement of illumination through reason but a movement of exposure, an effort to bring light to all the dark and secret places of European society. Foucault noted in an inverview: "A few haunted the latter...
Butter and Beer - September 05, 2006
Rossi writes (in Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science), "Though Bacon had violently attacked Paracelsus for such notions, he proposed to test the powers of imagination by trying to arrest the fermentation of beer and prevent churned milk from turning...
Bacon, Hobbes, Rousseau - September 05, 2006
Howard White traces out a bit of Bacon's lineage as a political philosopher: "Young Hobbes had accompanied Bacon on some of his walks, and Bacon delighted in his company. And Hobbes was to establish a system of political philosophy on...
God's Two Books - September 05, 2006
Paolo Rossi says of Bacon: "The distinction between the will and power of God, so fully and subtly present in Baconian texts, is very important. 'The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handworks': this very...
Bacon's Induction - September 05, 2006
Stanley Fish, in a renowned essay on Bacon's Essays, concludes that the essays are "unfinished with a purposefulness that makes the bestowing of the adjective less a criticism than a compliment." He insists on the provisionality of knowledge, and "communicates...
Epistemology of ingratitude - September 04, 2006
Blumenberg writes (Legitimacy of the Modern Age) that with Bacon, Kepler, and particularly Leibniz, the Augustinian suspicion of curiosity is overcome, and knowledge thereafter "justifies itself; it does not owe thanks for itself to God; it no longer has any...
Physics and Metaphysics - September 04, 2006
Blumenberg says that Bacon drew a distinction between metaphysics and physics in terms of human control: "The former has as its object the unalterable law beyond man's influence; the latter comprises all knowledge of the operative and material causes that...
Speeding up? - August 31, 2006
Todd Gitlin says we're not, or we are in only specific ways. George Eliot complained already in 1859 that "Leisure is gone . . . even idleness is eager now," and Nietzsche said that "Virtue has come to consist of...
For the Ladies - August 30, 2006
Between 1948 and 1951, Sayyid Qutb was in the US, and his reflections on this experience, published as Signposts, has been called the "key text of the jihadist movement." One of the things that particularly frightened Qutb was the freedom...
Crack-Up - August 29, 2006
In his book, The Last Days of the Renaissance, Theodore Rabb notes that one sign of the fragility of the late medieval church was its inability to continue to absorb fresh movements. This was not relativism; there was recognizable unity...
Josiah in Cultural History - August 29, 2006
A book on the uses of the biblical story of Josiah would make a fascinating cultural history. The Reformers found inspiration for iconoclasm in Josiah. Bacon described his program as "instauration," borrowing the Vulgate's term for the renovation of the...
Tensions of Modernity - August 29, 2006
Whitney (the book is Francis Bacon and Modernity, Yale, 1986) offers some additional meditations on the meaning of "modern" particularly as it relates to Bacon. He defines modernity in terms of the tension between innovation and tradition, the frustration that...
Revolutionary Reform - August 29, 2006
Whitney on Bacon again: "Reform invites analogy and multiple levels of meaning as it variously connects old and new; it exposes the poverty of brute facts by, for one thing, fixing knowledge in a hierarchy of literary kinds or genres....
Bacon the Prophet - August 29, 2006
In his defense of the legitimacy of the modern age, Hans Blumenberg attempts to pry apart the legitimate kernel ideas of modernity from the illegitimate, mostly medieval and superstitious, husks by which the kernel ideas were often expressed. Whether this...
Honor in Therapeutic culture - August 28, 2006
Bowman examines a scene from The Sopranos where John "Johnny Sack" Sacramoni seeks permission, from Tony Soprano among others to "clip" Ralph Cifaretto for jokingly insulting his wife's weight, which has done damage to her "body image, self esteem." None...
Honor and the Right - August 28, 2006
There's a scene in Malory where Launcelot has been caught in Guenevere's bedroom by his enemies, Aggravayne and Mordred, and in the ensuing altercation Launcelot kills 14 knights, all but Mordred, who is wounded. Summoned to appear before Arthur, Launcelot...
Word and World - August 26, 2006
Craig Gay (The Way of the (Modern) World) very lucidly traces a line of development from Descartes' separation of the human subject from the world of objects, through the Cartesian and Newtonian effort to reduce science to mathematics, to the...
New - August 24, 2006
Hans Jonas writes in an essay on technological and scientific advance that one of the key cultural shifts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a, well, new understanding of "new," and a corresponding revision of traditional ways of thinking...
Pre-Socratics - August 23, 2006
Bacon says in a number of places that Western history is like a stream that carries everything light and airy on the surface (like Plato and Aristotle) while submerging all the heavy stuff (Hermes and the Pre-Socratics). Intriguing that one...
Be the Bee - August 23, 2006
Aphorism 95 from Part I of Bacon's New Organon says: "Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners...
Witch Craze - August 17, 2006
Jeffrey Burton Russell, who identifies himself as a "lapsed atheist," has spent most of his career writing about Satan and hell. His most recent book is a history of the modern "mislaying" of heaven. Early in the book, he points...
Hegel and Hermes again - August 16, 2006
In the aforementioned book, Magee enumerates the following parallels between Hegel and Hermeticism: 1. Hegel holds that God's being involves "creation," the subject matter of his Philosophy of Nature. Nature is a moment of God’s being. 2. Hegel holds that...
Hermeticism and gnosticism - August 16, 2006
In his book on the hermeticist Hegel, Magee gives this helpful sketch of the differences between gnosticism and hermeticism: "Gnosticism and Hermeticism both believe that a divine 'spark' is implanted in man, and that man can come to know God....
Asocial sociability - August 14, 2006
Seigel devotes a fascinating section of his book (Idea of the Self) to a summary of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, in which Mandeville describes what Kant characterized as the "asocial sociability" of human nature. Social in the sense that...
Eschatological self - August 14, 2006
Jerrold Seigel suggests that Locke's self has "three different aspects": We are selves to others "by virtue of what they know about our mental and moral life"; we are "selves to ourselves, but incompletely so, through the imperfect consciousness we...
Before postmodernism - August 14, 2006
Writing in 1945, Arnold Nash wrote that "On the fundamental questions of life and destiny, as Kierkegaard has reminded modern man, neutrality is impossible. Even to take up a neutral position is to take up some position." The philosophy of...
Embedded mind - August 11, 2006
Modernity ignores the social, linguistic, and political context of thought, and the way interest shapes the mind; postmodernity foregrounds all this. Perhaps, but.... Descartes said that his travels demonstrates that "all those who hold notions strongly contrary to our own...
Self and World - August 11, 2006
For premoderns - ancients and medievals - there was a homology between the self and the world. Man was seen as microcosm, and, as Seigel puts it, they believed that "the world, like the self, is structured so as to...
Purity - August 11, 2006
According to Seigel, "Descartes's view of reason as most pure and solid when it was free of corruption by the world's confusions implied nothing less than the attempt to break free of all social and cultural experience." Not for the...
Reaching back - August 11, 2006
Bruce Holsinger shows that "postmodern" theory reaches back beyond the modern period to find resources for anti-modern critique in the medieval world. Early modern thinkers made a similar move: Stephen McKnight notes (in a Mars Hill Audio interview) that early...
Descartes's ambitions - August 11, 2006
Descartes's original title for Discourse on Method was "Project for a Science that Can Raise our Nature to its Highest Degree of Perfection." And for a number of years he worked on a treatise in which he "resolved to explain...
America's Military - August 11, 2006
Larry Schweikart, America's Victories: Why the U. S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror. New York: Sentinel, 2006. 324 pp. Many Americans regard the military as a world apart, a strange world of rank and ritual, tradition...
Machiavelli on honor - August 09, 2006
Machiavelli know what he was about. Though continuing to identify himself with Christianity, he advocated a revival of ancient concepts of virtu, and recognized that one key obstacle was the Christian revaluation of the value of honor. In the midst...
Left to Right - August 08, 2006
Butler cleverly suggests that postmodernism's leftism ends up underwriting rightist politics: "a left-inspired distrust of authority . . . makes recognition of difference possible, and yet those who are perhaps most in favor of leaving differently defined groups in isolation,...
Liberal to postmodern - August 08, 2006
Poor Christopher Butler: He really doesn't like postmodernism, but he keeps saying that postmodernism at its most sane is just repeating what liberals have always believed and doing what liberals have always done. Postmodernists challenge "the boundaries of our social...
Modernity of Postmodernism - August 08, 2006
Postmodern reading is characterized by a hermeneutics of suspicion, but in this postmodern critics are adopting a stance (sometimes quite consciously) rooted in Marxist and Freudian theory. Butler says, "in concentrating on the notion of hidden contradiction, many postmodernists allied...
On Getting it wrong - August 08, 2006
Butler argues that "many postmodern ideas" are "at best confused, and at worst simply untrue." But he's pretty sanguine about that: "the essential leading ideas of many cultural epochs are open to the same criticism" - he mentions the Romantic...
Parochial Postmodernism - August 08, 2006
Butler points out that postmodernism's claims that grand narratives are passe is very culturally specific, even parochial, and cannot be sustained as a sociological claim: "allegiances to large-scale, totalizing religious and naturalist beliefs are currently responsible for so much repression,...
Postmodern historiography - August 08, 2006
After reviewing some of the more radical proposals for a postmodern historiography, Christopher Butler, no friend to postmodernism, makes the sensible suggestion that "Postmodern relativism needn't mean that anything goes, or that faction and fiction are the same as history....
Modernity and Control - August 08, 2006
In the current issue of Mars Hill audio magazine, Ken Myers, quoting from Craig Gay, makes the important point that modernity is defined not so much by its aspiration to control as by the means it uses to achieve control....
Theory and the Avant Garde - August 07, 2006
In his Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford), Christopher Butler points out that postmodern art and postmodern theory arose at different times and had different sources of inspiration. Postmodernism in art is evident in the postwar period as art becomes...
Celibacy and the temple - August 03, 2006
George Buchanan suggests a connection between Jewish asceticism and the expansion of purity concerns following the destruction of Solomon's temple: "After the temple was burned in 586 . . . there was no longer a sacred place where the Lord...
Justification or gratitude - July 27, 2006
In a Biblical Horizons lecture, Rich Bledsoe argued that the doctrine of justification by faith was the doctrine that needed to be emphasized in the 16th century to exorcise the medieval world where power was based on condemnation. Because of...
Courtly love - July 22, 2006
A former student, Matt Dau, commented on reading David Bentley Hart's description of postmodernism and the sublime that it seemed very similar to the courtly love tradition - the dominating attraction of one's life is the inaccessible beauty of the...
Bataille and Danielou - July 22, 2006
Holsinger argues (Premodern Condition) that Bataille, despite writing a somme atheologique was not so much attacking or parodying Thomism as critiquing Thomas with resources taken from inside the medieval Catholic tradition. As an illustration of his "intellectual open-mindedness vis-a-vis the...
Priesthood of Believers - July 17, 2006
At various points in Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes how monastic discipline provided a model for early modern society forms. Factories were compared to monasteries not only in their organization but also in the spiritual dimension of factory management. Time-tables...
Rome and Modern Discipline - July 17, 2006
Rome was a model society for Europeans throughout the early modern period. But the Rome that served as a model differed from era to era and from writer to writer. Foucault writes: "the Roman model, at the Enlightenment, played a...
Inventing science - July 10, 2006
Bill Cavanaugh has argued that the early modern "wars of religion" were not really conflicts about religion but rather conflicts that created the modern notion of religion. Something similar can be said about the war between Scripture and science in...
Augustine Misunderstood - July 08, 2006
Was Augustine, as Charles Taylor and others have said, the inventor of Western interiority? Perhaps, but only because Augustine was misread. Matthew Maguire offers this summary of the the effects of Arnauld d'Andilly's 1649 French translation of Augustine's Confessions: "Although...
French Anthropology - July 04, 2006
Given the importance of figures like Durkheim, Mauss, and Levi-Strauss in anthropology, it's surprising to learn that "the French kept anthropology long under the umbrella of sociology, with the first degree in anthropology being awarded in 1968 and the first...
Influence - July 04, 2006
William St Clair (TLS May 12) makes the commonsensical point that a history of ideas requires an accompanying social history of reading, which is a history of the publishing trade: "When we read a book or essay called, say, 'The...
Globalization - July 04, 2006
Who said this? "What I have said of America applies to almost all the men of our time. Variety is disappearing from the breast of humankind; the same ways of acting, of thinking and of feeling, the same pop songs...
Time and Being - June 30, 2006
Louis Dupre suggests that modern thought is riven by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, the real is still conceived, as it classically has been, as an unchanging order, while on the other hand the subject determines meaning and...
Perfectibility - June 27, 2006
The Enlightenment held to a belief in human perfectibility, it is often said. The term itself was coined by Rousseau, but Rousseau saw it as a deeply ambiguous faculty, "the source of all misfortunes of man." Perfectibility is the faculty...
Spanish Civil War - June 26, 2006
In an illuminating review in TLS (June 2), Felipe Fernandez-Armesto summarizes the evidence that the Spanish Civil War was, as it turns out, thoroughly Spanish. He debunks the myth that Spain never participated in European cultural movements, pointing out that...
Constructive knowledge - June 23, 2006
In his fascinating study, The Conversion of Imagination, Matthew Maguire offers notes that "imagination is not always best understood as an emancipatory faculty that moves separately from or against scientific rationality." Rather, citing the work of Amos Funkenstein, Maguire suggests...
Salvation by Commerce - May 27, 2006
In a recent defense of the Enlightenment in Scotland and Naples, John Robertson focuses on the importance of commerce as an agent for renewing society. According to the summary of the TLS reviewer (March 24), Robertson "argues that the Enlightenment...
Dissent and Disestablishment - May 18, 2006
In another chapter of the same book, Larsen argues that British secularization promoted by Dissenters within England, and on specifically theological grounds. According to the "Protestant Dissenters' Catechism" (published 1772, by Samuel Palmer), a church is "a congregation, or voluntary...
Strauss in England - May 18, 2006
In his book Contested Christianity (Baylor, 2004), Wheaton historian Timothy Larsen examines the reception of DF Strauss's Life of Jesus in England. He suggests that only Darwin's Origin of Species rivals Strauss's book as a challenge to orthodoxy in Victorian...
Reformation and System-building - May 10, 2006
In discussing the Reformation, Oberman contrasts the via antiqua with the via moderna. Both believed in universals, preconceived ideas that enable humans to "select, interpret, and order the chaotic messages transmitted by the senses." They differed on the origin and...
Promise, Justification, Sacrament - May 06, 2006
Oberman says that Luther moved toward his reformation insights by exploring what he described as the "theological grammar" of Scripture, which involved letting God define his own terms, on the assumption that nomina sunt ad pacitum Dei. Through this, he...
Sola scriptura - May 04, 2006
According to Oberman, Luther's great discovery regarding Scripture was not that Scripture alone can be trusted without question and is the final judge of controversy: "the maxim of sola scriptura . . . was the fundamental principle of the entire...
Nature/Supernature in Luther - May 04, 2006
According to Oberman, "Luther's critique of Aristotle concerns the disregard of that fundamental nominalist axioma, the demarcation line between the realms of reason and faith. Provided that this distinction is respected, Aristotle is not merely useful but indeed to be...
Plague and Theology - May 04, 2006
Oberman again: "The experience of the [bubonic] plague may in fact help us understand the fifteenth-century ascendency of nominalism, its innovations in the whole field ranging from theology to science, and its successful invasion of schools and universities, where it...
Cultural history and religion - May 04, 2006
Heiko Oberman notes the impact of cultural history in his posthumously published book, The Two Reformations: "By moving from established politicla history to cultural and mentality studies, historians reestablished the crucial importance of religion, although they frequently marginalized it under...
Medievalism and theory - April 30, 2006
Bruce Holsinger's book, The Premodern Condition, is reviewed in the April 14 issue of TLS. Holsinger is tracing the rise of theory in France of the 1960s, and shows that the avant garde was "surprisingly heavily indebted to medievalism." He...
War against Mimesis - April 29, 2006
Baillie quotes the opening lines of Rousseau's Confessions, and notes that it, like Descartes's cogito, is an "effort to avert attention from what Girard calls mimetic desire, the elimination of which is tantamount to the rejection of Christian anthropology. Rousseau...
Creative destruction - April 29, 2006
Vitz suggests that postmodern thought has been largely an act of "creative destruction" serving as an "expose, in the best sense of the term." The result is "a much large intellectual framework within which everyone, including Christians, can function. It...
Modern self - April 29, 2006
Paul Vitz describes the modern self this way: "The modern self is characterized by such things as freedom and autonomy, by a strong will, and by the presumption that the self is self-created by the will, operating freely in its...
Anti-antimedievalism - April 29, 2006
David Burrell writes, "Modernity was fairly constituted by a quite specific opposition to medieval thought, as we have noted, so could be called 'post' or even 'antimedieval' . . . this mode of thinking proceeded by avoiding, if not aggressively...
Nature/Supernature, Gift and Grace - April 20, 2006
McGrath offers the following genealogy of the distinction of nature and supernature: Prior to the 12th century, theologians defined grace as a "gift of God" without distinguishing various kinds of gifts. But this left open the question of whether "all...
Augustine Misunderstood - April 20, 2006
CS Lewis said that the courtly love tradition arose from "Ovid misunderstood." Medieval soteriology might be said to have arisen from "Augustine misunderstood." Everyone was Augustinian and no one wanted to be Pelagian, but Augustine's actual teaching was confused by...
Unfinished Reformation - April 20, 2006
Nevin wrote: "There is more a great deal in Christianity, I firmly believe, more in the idea of hte Holy Catholic Church, than has yet been attained, either in the way of knowledge or in the way of life, by...
Passion - April 18, 2006
Stephen Jaeger's wonderful Ennobling Love (1999) sets up some bizarre juxtapositions. On the one hand, here is Anselm of Bec writing to two novices about the join the monastic community: "My eyes eagerly long to see your face, most beloved;...
Moral luck - April 15, 2006
Far from destroying ancient notions of moral luck (the notion that we must have good fortune to be ethically good), or following Stoicism in pulling back the moral into the inner soul, Christianity, in Milbank's view, "embraces moral luck to...
Postmodernism and Christianity - April 15, 2006
In an essay in Being Reconciled, Milbank describes postmodernity as "dissolving of fixed limits" in several respects: "(1) the blurring of the nature/culture divide; (2) the merging of public and private; (3) the mode of the information economy; and (4)...
Power of gift - April 13, 2006
Levi-Srauss doubts Mauss' spiritualization of the gift that Mauss draws from the Maori concept of "hau," the power that is communicated in, with, and under the gift. Rather, hau is "the conscious form whereby men of a given society ....
Twain on Gratitude - April 13, 2006
Thanks to NSA librarian Ed Iverson for providing references to Mark Twain's "Letters from Earth," where he assaults Christianity, and in several places mocks Christian gratitude to God. For instance: "Just so with diseases. If science exterminates a disease which...
Late Medieval Gratitude - April 13, 2006
Andrew Galloway traces the development of explicit discussions of gratitude in a 1994 article from the Journal of the History of Ideas. A few highlights: 1) Though he admits that gratitude was not "'invented' at some moment in human culture,"...
Highlights of Mauss, Gift - April 12, 2006
1) Methodologically, Mauss is particularly interested in investigating what he calls the "total social fact," a social reality that gives expression to all sorts of institutions simultaneously. Gift-exchange events such as the potlatch are "religious, juridical, and moral" and "relate...
Cultural Anthropology and the Gift - April 11, 2006
INTRODUCTION If "gift" has become a major category of recent thought, it is largely because of the influence of anthropology. Marcel Mauss' The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies is the single most important work in...
Existentialism redux - April 10, 2006
A web article on structuralism contrasts the objectivity of structuralism with the subjectivism of the existentialism that preceded it: "So while Existentialism emphasizes subjectivity, Structuralism embraces an objectivity so impersonal that it tends to dispense with the individual altogether. All...
Constantinianism and Protest - March 30, 2006
RA Markus (Christianity and the Secular) argues that as the church celebrated the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century, they also wanted to maintain their continuity with the church that gave them birth - the persecuted church of the...
Elizabethan Magic - March 22, 2006
Educated Elizabethans lived in a world of similitudes. As EMW Tillyard argued, the Elizabethan world picture was constituted by a series of analogous chains of being. The social world manifested and was manifested by the natural world; the universe as...
Renaissance on ingratitude - March 20, 2006
A few quotations from Renaissance writers on the subject of ingratitude, drawn from Catherine Dunn's excellent 1946 CUA dissertation on the subject: Lodowick Bryskett argued that ingratitude was contrary to reason: "How shamefull a thing is it therefore to man,...
Rome and responsibility - March 11, 2006
According to Jan Patocka, the Roman order represents a new stage in the history of responsibility because it represents a single entity toward which all are responsible: "the Roman principality presents the problem of a ne responsibility, founded upon transcendence...
Postmodern Society - March 01, 2006
Krishan Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society. Second Edition. London: Blackwell, 2005. 289 pp. Much has been written about postmodernity, but this book by Krishan Kumar, William R. Kennan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, is in...
Postmodern mathesis, 2 - February 25, 2006
Kumar argues that postmodernism is characterized by a contempt for the past, and by an embrace of the "depthless present." The result is an obsession with space: "The plane of the timeless present is the spatial. If things do not...
Reflexive modernization - February 25, 2006
Ulrich Beck suggests that the contemporary world is less post-modern than radicalized modernity, a modernity that has become self-conscious and self-reflexive. He writes: "Just as modernization dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced the industrial...
Post and modernism - February 23, 2006
Ihab Hassan contrasted modernism and postmodernism by reference to Authority and Anarchy. He suggested, in Kumar's summary, that postmodernism "involved a tendency toward 'Indeterminacy,' a compound of pluralism, eclecticism, randomness and revolt. Indeterminacy also connoted 'deformation,' a stress on decreation,...
Counter-culture and post-modern - February 23, 2006
Kumar notes that the 1960s counter-culture set itself against everything in modernism: "Pop art and pop music, the 'new wave' in cinema and the 'new novel' in literature, thne elision of the boundaries between 'art' and 'life,' the cultivation of...
Early McLaren? - February 23, 2006
In a 1965 essay, Leslie Fiedler celebrated the new movements of the 1960s as post-modern, post-Freudian, post-Humanist, post-Protestant, post-white, post-male....
Postmodernism/ity - February 23, 2006
Kumar suggests that there is no useful distinction to be made between postmodernity as a socio-political concept and postmodernism as a cultural concept. All the instincts of postmodernists are against such a differentiation of spheres. For postmodernists, it is no...
Two modernisms - February 23, 2006
Kumar defines modernism as an intellectual, cultural and artistic revolt against modernity. Yet modernism itself, especially as expressed in architecture, was complex and racked with internal contradictions: "It could denounce the 'inauthentic' present in the name of the future, as...
Two modernities? - February 23, 2006
At least two: The modernity of science and technology, the factory system and city planning, of bureacracy and management. And on the other hand the modernity of sensibility, literature, hedonism, the lust for ever-new experience. On the one hand, Industrialization;...
Liquid modernity - February 23, 2006
"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation . . . All fixed, fast-frozen relationships . . . are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify." Zygmunt Bauman? No: Marx...
Modernity and antiquity - February 23, 2006
Kumar suggests that "some of the principal hall-marks of modernity" are already evident in the Christian notions of time and history. Both Christianity and modernity separate time from nature, and humanize time; time is seen by both as "linear and...
First Modernity - February 23, 2006
The Latin modernus was coined in the late fifth century, as an antonym to antiquus, and variations of modernus became particularly common after the 10th century. Thus, Krishan Kumar writes, "Modernity is . . . an invention of the Christian...
Aesthetic proletariat - February 23, 2006
Bohemians, Featherstone suggests, were the first "true artistic proletariat," living next to lower class people in low-rent areas of the larger cities, and imitating the lifestyle of the lower classes: "They cultivated similar manners, valuing spontaneity, an anti-systematic work ethos,...
Aestheticization of life - February 23, 2006
Featherstone isolates three aspects of the postmodern aestheticization of daily life: 1) Artistic movements such as Dada and Surrealism attempt to break down the boundary between art and daily life by turning toilets and such into art objects. This is...
Postmodern mathesis - February 22, 2006
Modernity attempts to spatialize time, and to chart temporally shifting reality in a fixed mathesis. So argues Catherine Pickstock at least. But in this sense postmodernism is hypermodernism. Featherstone notes that MTV "seems to exist in a timeless present with...
Turn of the Century Bobos - February 22, 2006
Mike Featherstone, expounding on the "aestheticitization of everyday life" that he claims is characteristic of the postmodern ethos, notes that similar motifs are evident in the early development of the fashion industry: "The intensified place of fashion increases our time-consciousness,...
Tantrum of the Intellectuals - February 21, 2006
Featherstone suggests that postmodernism is in part a "loss of confidence on the part of the intellectuals in the universal potential of their project." Thus, postmodern theory is marked by "tendencies toward indeterminacies, the recognition of openness, pluralism, randomness, eclecticism,...
postmodern aestheticization - February 16, 2006
Featherstone again: "Postmodernism effectively thrusts aesthetic questions toward the center of sociological theory: it offers aesthetic models and justifications for the reading and critique of texts (the pleasure of the text, intertextuality, writerly texts) and aesthetic models for life (the...
Features of Postmodernism - February 16, 2006
Featherstone wisely notes the danger of "simply relabelling experiences as postmodern which were formerly granted little significance," and laments that many definitions of postmodernism are too loose and vague to be useful. Yet, even if contemporary thinkers are simply re-packaging...
Self-conscious modernity - February 07, 2006
Postmodernity is from one angle modernity coming to self-consciousness. Managerialism is as much at the heart of modernity as of postmodernity, but postmoderns know they are being managed. As a result, management is always shot through with irony. How can...
Postmodern society - February 07, 2006
David Lyon's little book, Postmodernity, provides an excellent introduction to the sociological, technological, and political contexts in which postmodern thought has arisen. He is cautious about inflating claims about a "postmodern" condition or the coming of a "new society," but...
Rise of Psychology - January 17, 2006
A thesis, which may prove, when the actual evidence is examined, to be wholly wrong: The thesis: Psychology and its related disciplines do not arise from clinical study or laboratory research, but as a branch of literary criticism. Evidence (extremely...
Paradox of Community - January 06, 2006
Bauman suggests that postmodernity, which is the "age of contingency fur sich," is also the age of community. Yet, the communities that are possible within postmodern culture are inherently unstable; they are "clouds of communities": "Such communities will never be...
Postmodern critique, postmodern re-enchantment - January 04, 2006
"Postmodernity," writes Zygmunt Bauman in his 1992 Intimations of Postmodernity, "means many different things to many different people. It may mean a building that arrogantly flaunts the 'orders' prescribing what fits what and what should be kept strictly out to...
Christopher Dawson and the New Age - December 29, 2005
Christopher Dawson, who died in 1970, was one of the leading historians of the twentieth century. A devout Roman Catholic, hededicated his career, and some 25 books, to understanding andexplaining history, particularly Western history, from aChristian perspective. One little book,...
Chromosomes or Culture? - December 28, 2005
Stanford's Carl N. Degler's In Search of Human Nature tells the story of the contest between biological and cultural determinists in the social sciences. Much of late 19th-century social science was shaped by a crude Darwinian paradigm. Biological factors like...
Malthus and Conservatism - December 28, 2005
One of the many ironies of contemporary political discourse is the co-option of Malthus by the political left, for the Rev. Thomas Malthus was undoubtedly a man of the right. His Essay on the Principle of Population was an anti-utopian...
Medieval Technology - December 27, 2005
A number of years ago, Stanley Jaki, a Roman Catholic historian of science, published an article in Modern Age defending the technological acumen of medievals. He cited three medieval inventions that provide evidence "of the striking modernity ofthe Middle Ages."...
Christianity and Modernity - December 23, 2005
Wells makes the very interesting point that postmodernism has done to modernity in a few decades what Christian opposition to modernity was incapable of doing over the course of centuries: "On just about every front Enlightenment ideas have been fought...
Augustine and the Renaissance Self - December 22, 2005
William Bouwsma points out in his book on the "waning of the Renaissance" that the Renaissance challenged what he calls the "traditional conception of the self," in which reason sits at the top of a hierarchy of discrete faculties, including...
Consumption v. Culture - December 20, 2005
Hannah Arendt claimed that "An object is cultural depending on the duration of its permanence: its durable character is opposed to its functional aspect, that aspect which would make it disappear from the phenomenal world through use and wear and...
Calvin's Theocracy - December 08, 2005
Lindberg points out that "Calvin's Protestant contemporaries did not view Geneva as a vengeful theocracy. Thousands of religious refugees flocked to Geneva from nearly every province in France, as well as from England, Scotland, Holland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, and...
Monks and culture - December 08, 2005
Lindberg summarizes the important, if sometimes inadvertent, cultural contributions of monasticism: "Monastic culture was not limited to copying texts from the past, but also engaged in a variety of intellectual pursuits related to monastic life. These included maintaining a liturgical...
Modern heroism - November 29, 2005
Zygmunt Bauman, in the book mentioned above, traces the shifts in Western cultural imagination from the ancient hero through the Christian martyr, to the revival of the ancient heroic ideal in the early modern period, to our current cult of...
Conservator - November 29, 2005
An etymology of "conservative" from the online Dictionary of the History of Ideas (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/DicHist/dict.html): In Latin conservare means to protect, preserve, save; the noun of agency, conservator, appears as a synonym for the substantives custos, servator. Just as the Greek...
Modern sacralization - November 28, 2005
Still on Bauman: "In most of its descriptions, modernity is presented as a time of secularization ('everything sacred was profaned,' as young Marx and Engels memorably put it) and disenchantment. What is less often mentioned, however, though it should be,...
Desire and resistance - November 28, 2005
More on Bauman, since that last post was getting too long: Consumerism, we (especially Christians) tend to think, is driven by desire; if so, perhaps the solution is to limit or suppress desire. Bauman points out that the goal of...
Hybridization - November 28, 2005
In his pungent recent book, Liquid Life (Polity, 2005), the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes the divergence between the "teaching" and the "taught" classes within the global economy. What he calls the "knowledge classes" are experts at seeking and achieving...
History of the Sentence - November 24, 2005
Ian Robinson's The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1998) is a fascinating discussion of the history of the sentence and of English punctuation, and, despite its heavy-handed title, is a delight to read....
Dynamo and virgin - November 03, 2005
Modernism, critic Richard Lehan writes, was built on the conception that the world was caught in a conflict between organicism and mechanism, between the feminine and masculine, or, as Henry Adams put it, between the dynamo and the virgin. Modernist...
American empire - September 29, 2005
Fred Anderson and Andrew Clayton suggest a revisionist, imperial reading of American history: "At least from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present, American wars have either expressed a certain kind of imperial ambition or have resulted directly...
Ancient slavery - July 30, 2005
S.S. Bartchy offers this important summary of the differences between ancient and American slavery: "Central features that distinguish 1st century slavery from that later practiced in the New World are the following: racial factors played no role; education was greatly...
Delayed Globalization - June 29, 2005
In his account of the beginning of World War I, Europe's Last Summer, David Fromkin notes that globalization was already well underway prior to 1914, and in fact was in some ways more advanced than at any time since: "You...
Decline of war - May 25, 2005
Gregg Easterbrook, a regular source of counter-intuitive insight, summarizes recent studies that show a decade-long decline in war around the world (TNR, May 30): "Five years ago, two academics - Monty Marshall, research director at the Center for Global Policy...
Renaissance and Modernity - May 20, 2005
The following is a more extensive version of a post from February 2004, under the same title. INTRODUCTION My thesis is developed over against a widespread conception of the Renaissance as the beginning of the modern world, the beginning of...
Pentecostalism - May 14, 2005
Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom is packed with stimulating historical insights. But this is one of the most striking: Most “listings of major trends of the past centuryEhave “rightly devoted much space to political movements like fascism and communism, but...
Troy and Homer - April 27, 2005
Joachim Latacz, Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery. Translated by Kevin Windle and Rosh Ireland. Oxford University Press, 2004. 342 pp. Since I was a young teenager, a memory has haunted my mind, a memory of...
Victor Davis Hanson - March 19, 2005
This post is currently missing due to a server crash. Perhaps in the future, Dr. Leithart will re-write it. -- Admin....
Renaissance Machinery - February 19, 2005
Another interesting review in the TLS, of Jessica Wolfe's Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge), an exploration of the literary uses of machinery and machine imagery in Renaissance literature. According to Wolfe, Renaissance writers saw "the profound applicability of mechanical...
Rhetoric of Reformation - January 31, 2005
Explaining how Luther revived the "classic" Christus Victor theory of the atonement, Gustav Aulen points to Luther's deployment of patristic rhetoric and imagery that had been lost in the Middle Ages: "Luther loves violent expressions, strong colors, realistic images, and...
Paul and Reformation - January 27, 2005
Adherents to some form of the New Perspective on Paul are notorious for saying that the Catholic opponents of the Reformers were significantly different from the Jewish opponents of Paul, and that the issues Paul dealt with were not those...
1421 - January 12, 2005
Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (New York: William Morrow, 2002), 552 pp. Pursuing his passion for medieval cartography, Gavin Menzies, a veteran of the British Royal Navy, discovered a 1424 Venetian map that showed four strangely named...
Enlightenment - January 12, 2005
Peter Hanns Reill, ed., and Ellen Judy Wilson, principal author, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (revised edition; New York: Facts on File, 2004), 670pp. Contemporary critics of modernity, including Christian ones, often focus their attacks on “The Enlightenment,Ethe intellectual and cultural...
"Ecumenical History" - January 05, 2005
In a 1985 Presidential address to the American Historical Society, William H. McNeill has advocated a form of historical writing that he calls “mythistory,Ewhich, in McNeill’s view, should take the form of “ecumenical history.EScientific models of history, McNeill argues, are...
CA Bayly on Global History - January 01, 2005
In a brief article in the Feb 2004 issue of History Today, C. A. Bayly describes the current state of global history. He points out that even postmodern historians who stridently oppose history as told by the colonial victors, are...
Anger - December 28, 2004
"In most of our scholarly literature about the classical world," writes Columbia University's William V. Harris in his Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, "political and religious change . . . seems to take place in...
Wit and Judgment - December 17, 2004
Roger D Lund has an intriguing article on wit in seventeenth century English literature in the January 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas. Lund quotes Hobbes, whose statement sets up the opposition that continued through the...
Hitler and the Christians - December 17, 2004
Neuhaus provides an illuminating summary of Stephen Ozment's history of Germany in the November issue of FT. This in particular: "'The original motives for the war were completely self-centered, not Judeocentric or anti-Semitic. Germans wanted to avenge and repair, by...
Historical Change - December 14, 2004
In his Teaching Company tapes on Chaucer, Seth Lehrer claims that the medievals lacked a conception of historical change, and that one of the key cultural effects of the Renaissance was to introduce the idea that things change. This at...
Soviet Apologists - December 13, 2004
It's mighty hard to find apologists for Bolshevism these days, so I was surprised to find the following in the December 2 issue of the London Review of Books (in Neal Ascherson's review of the recently republished books on Trotsky...
Alexander - December 07, 2004
Peter Green, reviewing Paul Cartledge's new Alexander biography in TNR, cites a "remarkable anecdote told by Theophrastus, who surely had it from Aristotle when the latter was Alexander's tutor": "Both Philip and Olympias, he alleges, were scared that their adolescent...
Christianity and the Margins - December 03, 2004
Christians are committed to the notion that the margins may be the center: We believe that a stable in Bethlehem-Judah is the site where a new humanity is born; that catacombs serve as incubator for a renewed empire; that German...
Out of the Ghetto: Church History as Global History, Part III - December 02, 2004
(This is the weakest part.) Postmodern historiography has rightly protested against this kind of bigotry. But in the process, postmoderns have apparently jettisoned the entire idea of a universal history, if not the idea of history itself. For postmoderns, to...
Out of the Ghetto: Church History as Global History, Part II - December 02, 2004
This is much weaker, but I think the argument is still clear enough. Of course, in central respects, this proposal calls for a revival of a project that dominated Christian historical writing from Eusebius to the Enlightenment. For Christian theologians...
Out of the Ghetto: Church History as Global History, Part I - December 02, 2004
This is the first draft (sans footnotes) of a paper I will deliver in January. The remainder of this draft will be posted on this site. To this day, schoolchildren in Sri Lanka learn about Buddhist “doctrineEfrom a Buddhist Catechism...
England and Enlightenment - August 16, 2004
Paul Rahe has a fascinating article in the Summer 2004 issue of the Wilson Quarterly, in which he discusses the assessments of 18th-century world order that were offered by Voltaire and Montesquieu. Along the way, he suggests a connection between...
Suicide - July 30, 2004
Some exceprts from Coppelia Kahn's stimulating feminist study of Shakespeare's Roman plays [Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (Routledge, 1997)], with appended theological reflections: The word “suicideEdoes “not appear in ancient Latin, but is, rather, an English derivative from Latin...
Pentecostal Civilization - July 26, 2004
Gilbert Highet has a wonderful chapter on translation in the Renaissance in his book, The Classical Tradition. He says that the first translation that we know of was made about 250 BC by the Greek-Roman poet Livius Andronicus, who translated...
Church History as Global History - July 14, 2004
The following is an abstract for a conference paper that I will be presenting in January 2005. Church history has often been regarded by the professional historians as a quaint hagiographic outpost for the pious. Globalization, along with developments within...
Rome in English Perspective - July 14, 2004
Here are some quotations from Clifford Ronan's fascinating study of Roman plays in early modern England, Antike Rome (University of Georgia, 1995). "We moderns often overlook the playfulness and garishness of Antiquity, thinking instead of weather-beaten bleached marble Doric columns,...
Reformation and Rome - July 14, 2004
When, in the European consciousness, did the Roman Empire end? 404 or 476 make sense, but I wonder if the Reformation was the true end of imperial Rome. Protestants frequently saw continuities of some sort between the Roman imperial authority...
Luther und Melanchthon - June 16, 2004
Timothy Wengert's article in the Lutherjahrbuch 66 (1999) offers an analysis of the controverted relationship between Luther and Melanchthon. Wengert puts aside psychological assessments of the relationship, and does not focus on theological similarities and differences, which might have the...
Europe and Christendom - June 10, 2004
Writing in the June 2004 issue of Commentary, George Weigel examines the European conflict between the "Cathedral and the Cube." The cube in question is La Grande Arche in Paris, which houses the International Foundation for Human Rights; the cathedral...
Charles Wilkes' Voyage - May 21, 2004
Also in the April 30 TLS is a review of Nathaniel Philbrick's book on the South Seas expedition of 1838-1842, sponsored by the U.S. government and placed under the command of Charles Wilkes. It was one of the greatest sea...
The Persistence of Romanticism - May 21, 2004
Two reviews in the April 30 edition of the TLS highlight the continuing influence of Romanticism. Colin Falck's American and British Verse in the Twentieth Century characterizes romanticism as the effort "to build a spiritual work in the context of...
Protestantism and Protectionism - May 08, 2004
According to Jacob Viner's Religious Thought and Economic Society, Protestants were more apt to advocate mercantilism than Catholics, and the differences were rooted in their different attitudes toward the nation-state: "Mercantilism penetrated much less into Catholic than into Protestan theology....
Luther and Islam - May 05, 2004
According to a web article by J. Paul Rajashekar, "Luther wrote six different pieces of literature on the subject between 1528 through 1542: On War Against Turk (1529); A Sermon Against the Turks (1529); A Book on Life and Customs...
Europe and Power - April 29, 2004
Robert Kagan's acclaimed little book, Paradise and Power, offers the following insightful analysis into the contemporary European vision of the world and the European hostility to and suspicion of US power. After WW2, Kagan writes, "European strategy culture" set out...
Making Our Enemies - April 21, 2004
Lee Harris has some fascinating comments on how the liberal West constructed the Islamic threat in his recent book, Civilization and Its Enemies. Harris points out that the early modern state developed in a kind of Darwinian political world, where...
Money, Magic, and Signs - April 19, 2004
David Hawkes reviews a book on Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton in the April 2 TLS, and has this to say about the early modern suspicion of attempting to "do things with words": "The influx into Renaissance...
On Books - April 19, 2004
David McKitterick's Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 describes the move from manuscript to book as a gradual process rather than a sudden revolution. According to the reviewer in the TLS, McKitterick points out that books and manuscripts...
Goddesses in the Middle Ages - April 19, 2004
Robert Lerner reviews Barbara Newman's God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages in the March 19 issue if the TLS. Newman's book analyzes the female deities and allegorical figures of medieval literature and belief, including...
Clash and Decline of Civilizations - April 04, 2004
David Warren examines Edward Said's Orientalism and the more recent Occidentalism by Ian Buruma"and Avishai Margalit in the April issue of Commentary. His critique of Said is devastating and he also finds the Buruma/Margalit volume unsatisfying, but the most interesting...
Homosexuality and Civilization - March 27, 2004
Christians have sometimes suggested that homosexual practice is universally condemned. In Homosexuality and Civilization, Louis Crompton, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nebraska and a longtime gay activist, shows that homosexuality was common and accepted in various forms...
Those Crazy Medievals - February 25, 2004
In the late twelfth century, the English writer Nigel Wireker produced the Speculum Stultorum, the “Mirror of Dunces.EIn this story, an ass, Brunellus, dissatisfied with his short tail, leaves home to visit the famous physician Galen to get a prescription...
New Hodge Biography - February 09, 2004
I am informed by a correspondent that Andrew Hoffecker of RTS Jackson is writing a biography of Hodge that will be published in 2006 by P&R....
Hodge Biography - February 09, 2004
A review of the recent collection of essays on Charles Hodge claims that no biography of Hodge has appeared since his son's 1880 account. This is fairly astonishing, given Hodge's importance even to this day. It's a gap in the...
Human Accomplishment - February 09, 2004
Philip Jenkins has a superb review of Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment in the Feb issue of First Things. Jenkins challenges Murray's basic method, which involved a process of selecting eminent persons in science and culture by attending to their role...
Renaissance and Modernity - February 04, 2004
Here's an ouline for a lecture on Renaissance and Modernity: Renaissance and Modernity Credenda/Agenda History Conference Pre-Conference Lecture February 5, 2004 Peter J. Leithart I. Assessments of the Renaissance and modernity. A. What is "modernity"? Slavoj Zizek in The Puppet...
Mutability and Change - January 30, 2004
Part of the Renaissance recovery of history was an emphasis on mutability and change. Few themes so dominate the poetry of Spenser or the sonnets of Shakespeare as the fear that Time will gobble up everything good. This was continuous...
Books and Culture Reviews - January 01, 2004
A potpourri of interesting reviews in Books & Culture: 1) Gerald McDermott reviews several recent evangelical books on Christianity's relation to non-Christian religions. He is critical of attempts (Paul Heim, e.g.) to root a pluralist or inclusivist view of other...
Dollimore on Christianity - December 30, 2003
As I suspected, Dollimore gives Christianity's cultural influence short shrift. He has a lot of insightful things to say about the ancients, but then he sees almost total continuity through early Christianity Ethe same links of desire and death, the...
Ideas that Changed the World - December 24, 2003
When I see books with titles like Ideas That Changed the World I have one main reaction: Suspicion. That suspicion increases when the book is filled with splashy photos and sidebars full of soundbite-sized analysis. In the hands of Felipe...
Hart on Cowling - November 26, 2003
In the December 2003 issue of First Things, David B. Hart has an interesting review of the work of Maurice Cowling. Cowling, as hard right as they come in Britain, is also a Christian historian, whose magnum opus traces the...
Diaspora Jews and the Church - November 23, 2003
In the course of saying some interesting and true things about Rome and Roman empire, Richard Horsely raised this revealing question: What is it, he wondered, that made so many diaspora Jews join the church so quickly? What was driving...
Exhortation, November 2 - November 02, 2003
Exhortation for November 2: On the eve of the Reformation, the church was more geographically limited than it had been for a millennium, and it was on the defensive. Long before, Christianity been forced underground in its birthplace in the...
Courtly Love - October 28, 2003
On courtly love: The basic shift is from the ancient and early medieval view that eros sapped and vitiated virtus to a belief that eros was a condition of the possibility of virtus and valor. This is, as Lewis said,...
Animal Rights - October 23, 2003
A very interesting article in the same issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas by Rod Preece of Wilfrid Laurier University. He examines the effect of Darwinism on moral debates about treatment of animals during the 19th century,...
Edwards and Western Theological Tradition - October 19, 2003
The same Weekly Standard review mentioned in a previous post gives a brief summary of the editorial introduction to Volume 21 of the Works of Jonathan Edwards, written by Sang Hyun Lee: "Lee claims that Edwards marks a stunning departure...
Enlightenment - October 19, 2003
Two very different evaluations of the Enlightenment appear in recent books. First from Robert Darnton, historian of the French Enlightenment, who, according to the reviewer in the October 6 TNR, devotes the first and most substantative essay in his recent...
Writing and Democratization - October 14, 2003
JP Vernant points out the connection between writing and democratization: "In the kingdoms of the New East, writing was a privilege and specialty of scribes. Writing enabled the royal administration to control the economic and social life of the State...
Edwards and Beowulf - October 02, 2003
Thinking through an upcoming lecture on Edwards, I had a Borgesian moment: In 1731, there was a fire at the Cottonian library in England that nearly destroyed the single manuscript containing the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. In the same year, Edwards...
Thought Experiment - September 15, 2003
Here's a fun thought experiment from David Wootton's review of J.C.D. Clark's book, Our Shadowed Present. Clark puts forward this theory in earnest. "in 1688, James II fled England to escape the advancing army of William of Orange; had he...
Gleanings - September 14, 2003
Here are some gleanings from a Sunday evening of periodical catching-up: 1) Christopher Hitchens offers a blistering assessment of JFK in his TLS review of Robert Dallek's biography, An Unfinished Life. Hitchens focuses especially on JFK's medical history, summarizing this...
Aldous Huxley - September 14, 2003
The life of Aldous Huxley is a parable of the modern age. Descended from Darwin's bulldog Thomas Henry Huxley and Matthew Arnold, Huxley was part of an elite intellectual class of distinctly Victorian orientation. He was greatly offended by the...
Stabbing the Privates - September 11, 2003
Neil Elliot, in the book mentioned in the previous post, says that "The conspirators who assassinated Caligula included an officer he had sexually humiliated, who stabbed the emperor repeatedly in the genitals." I recall that Plutarch records something similar about...
Evangelical Historians - September 04, 2003
It's intriguing that some of our best historians these days are evangelicals. George Marsden's biography of Jonathan Edwards is just one more in a string of widely-reviewed and well-reviewed works from Marsden. Mark Noll has made the big time. And...
Genovese on Noll - September 04, 2003
Eugene Genovese has a typically pungent and pugnacious review of Mark Noll's America's God in the current issue of The New Republic. He commends Noll's scholarship, research, erudition, and calls him one of the best of contemporary American historians. He...
More Auden - August 21, 2003
Some more quotations from the same Auden essay (the whole thing is wonderful): He is, like CS Lewis in Allegory of Love, comparing Greek conceptions of love with medieval and modern romantic coceptions, but adds a dash of de Rougemont:...
Bakhtin - August 08, 2003
I've been reading a good bit of Mikhail Bakhtin this summer, and have come across some pretty mind-blowing passages in his Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and his World. The following quotations have to do with the role of humor in...
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1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
