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Category Archive: Miscellaneous

Unread books - November 10, 2007
Jay McInerny reviews First Chapter: How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard in the NYT. He says in part: "Bayard's hero in this enterprise is the librarian in Robert Musil's 'Man Without Qualities' (a book I...

Wisdom to scholars - October 20, 2007
Also from John of Salisbury: He attacks teachers who "sift and scrutinize every syllable," as well as those bloaty-footnoted types who "compile the opinions of all, even the most miserable."...

Chatter - October 20, 2007
Educational advice from John of Salisbury: "Considerable indulgence must be shown . . . to the young, and loquacity should be tolerated for a time so that they may wax eloquent. . . . As students mature, however, this verbosity...

An ex-parrott - September 29, 2007
Alex the African Grey died on September 6 at the age of 31. According to the obit in the Economist, Irene Pepperberg, a theoretical chemist who worked with Alex, had worked with Alex to the point that he "had the...

Fathers and sons - September 26, 2007
Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father is often viciously cynical, sometimes sexually explicit, but at times it hits home, hard. Like this: To the father who says in exasperation to his son, "I changed your diapers for you, little snot," Barthleme...

Cool or good - September 17, 2007
Pountain and Robins comment that Cool "is in the process of becoming the dominant type of relation between people in Western societies, a new secular virtue. No-one wants to be good any more, they want to be Cool."...

Gnostic bodies again - September 15, 2007
Our obsessiveness about exercise and health seems supremely anti-gnostic. But the opposite is the case. Consider the imagery: "Buns of steel" and "Abs of iron" and "Cable-like biceps." The bodybuilder aims to exercise himself to robothood. His goal to exercise...

Gargoyles - August 15, 2007
Vladimir Nabokov: "Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade - demons placed there merely to show they have been...

Hope - August 14, 2007
Chesterton again: "It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth....

Greatness and equality - August 14, 2007
In his inimitably paradoxical style, Chesterton notes that "One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men. . . . This has been hidden from us of...

Praeparatio evangelii - August 14, 2007
One Axel Schmidt has written a book entitled: Die Suche nach dem rechten Lebens-Mittel. Harry Potter als Beispiel einer modernen praeparatio Evangelii. "Harry Potter" is part of the subtitle, of course, the Harry Potter that, for Schmidt, is an "example...

Tintin and the Culture Wars, II - August 05, 2007
A reader, John Halton, writes in response to my comments on Tintin in the Congo: "I think the reason why Tintin in the Congo has 'suddenly become controversial' is fairly simple: a new paperback edition of the book has just...

Tintin and the Culture Wars - August 05, 2007
Published in 1931, Tintin in the Congo has suddenly become controversial. The British Commission for Racial Equality urges that this volume of "racist claptrap" be removed from bookshops everywhere; "It beggars belief in this day and age that any shop...

Best Catholic Writing - August 03, 2007
Shameless plug follows. Jim Manney of Loyola Press was generous enough to ask permission to reprint my essay, "Why Protestants Can't Write" to The Best Catholic Writing, 2007. As if I didn't have enough troubles. The volume includes essays by...

Sicko - July 19, 2007
Conflicting incentives are built into the American health care system. On the one hand, many patients depend on insurance companies to pay their bills, and come into a health crisis with a "no expense spared" mentality. On the other hand,...

Radical Penance - July 12, 2007
According to the Muslim commentator Ibn Abbas, "after the fall, Adam and Eve fasted for forty days and Adam abstained from having sex with Eve for a hundred years."...

As the preacher preaches - July 05, 2007
In a footnote in Fear and Trembling explaining the phrase "things do not go in the world as the preacher preaches," Kierkegaard says, "In the old days, people said: It is too bad that things do not go in the...

Irving Berlin - July 02, 2007
In his Operation Shylock, Philip Roth's double, Moishe Pipik (Yiddish for "Moses Bellybutton"), advocates a reverse Zionism known as Diasporism. He is encouraging Jews to return to Eastern Europe, and imagines that "People will be jubilant. People will be in...

On my honesty - June 18, 2007
I've gotten wind that somewhere out there in the vast howling wilderness of cyberspace some have hinted - nay, more than hinted - that I have only recently begun to show my true colors, and only under pressure from the...

Mary Douglas, RIP - June 08, 2007
Mary Douglas has died. She began her career as a cultural anthropologist, writing seminal works on purity, symbols, food, social organization, and other topics. She collaborated with Aaron Wildavsky on a book on risk. But perhaps her greatest contribution has...

NYC Water - May 14, 2007
Nathaniel Altman writes in his book Sacred Water: "underground aqueducts have brought water from the Croton Reservoir to New York City since the early 1840s. The water flowed originally into a reservoir located in Central Park that could hold 180...

Wilson debate - May 13, 2007
Doug Wilson is carrying on a debate with polymath and militant atheist Christopher Hitchens at the Christianity Today web site, here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/mayweb-only/119-12.0.html...

Perichoretic imagination - May 10, 2007
One of the differences between those associated with "Federal Vision" theology and those opposed to it is a difference of theological imagination. The opponents operate with a theological imagination that distinguishes and clarifies; ontology is distinguished from relationality, nature from...

Exhortation, Fourth Sunday After Easter - May 06, 2007
For many of you, this will be your last Sunday in Moscow for a while. You have spent the past year studying the Bible, or learning music, or reading great books, or honing your rhetorical skills, or writing a thesis....

MiGs into crosses - May 03, 2007
Sudanese artist Philip Makuei has used scrap metal from crashed MiG fighters to make decorative crosses. Isaiah 2:4....

African Lorica - May 03, 2007
A Transvaal hymn celebrates Jesus' victory: Jesus Christ is Conqueror By his resurrection he overcame death itself By his resurrection he overcame all things He overcame magic He overcame amulets and charms He overcame the darkness of demon possession He...

Clobbering Satan - May 02, 2007
A Zulu song includes the line, "Aka na mandla uSathane/ S'omshaya nge vhesi." Philip Jenkins translates: "Satan has no power/ we wil clobber him with a [biblical] verse."...

Rushdoony in Africa - May 02, 2007
A number of writers have drawn up exposes of the "theocratic" agenda of evangelical Republicans over the past two years, and many find the darkly Armenian figure of RJ Rushdoony lurking behind every legislative proposal and protest march. They don't...

Lost - May 01, 2007
Anything by Ross Douthat is worth reading. In the current issue of First Things, he examines the role of religion in several TV programs - Battlestar Gallactica, Lost, and The Sopranos. He notes that the island in Lost is a...

Clive James - April 27, 2007
Some highlights from Clive James's recent fascinating Cultural Amnesia. Speaking of the lack of adventure in today's successful careers: "Could there be anything less astonishing than to work day and night on Wall Street to make the millions that will...

Nicholas of Lyra's afterlife - March 29, 2007
In Book 3 of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais attributes an odd opinion to the 14th-century exegete, Nicholas of Lyra: "Pantagruel, having wholly subdued the land of Dipsody, transported thereunto a colony of Utopians, to the number of 9,876,543,210 men, besides...

Interpretive communities - March 28, 2007
In his homilies on Ezekiel, Gregory the Great admitted that he frequently learned as he taught: "I know that very often I understand things in the sacred writings when I am with my brethren, which, when alone, I could not...

Sleep-reading - March 28, 2007
In a letter to Pope Damasus, Jerome writes, "In your eyes to read without also writing is to sleep."...

Obscene dancing - March 21, 2007
The London Times fulminates: "It is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies, in this dance, to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve...

Andrew Sullivan Responds - March 07, 2007
Last time Andrew Sullivan took note of something I wrote, he implied I was anti-Semitic for writing a favorable obit for RJ Rushdoony. Today, he noted my little piece on health care, published on the First Things web site, on...

Cooler Heads - February 20, 2007
Some good friends, who happen to agree with the substance of my arguments about vulgar speech, suggested that the arguments would be more effective if I didn't use the obscenities in their full form in the post. I have made...

On Vulgar Language - February 19, 2007
I have been taken to task elsewhere on the web for a few posts on my site that included obscene and vulgar words. It's been argued that my posts violate biblical standards for speech and writing. That's the issue I...

Modern Sex-Speak - February 19, 2007
Here is another older piece, first published in the Chalcedon Report in 1988 (hence the dated bibliography and references), on the question of how Christians should talk about sex. Part of the point is that even non-obscene terms can be...

Horse flies - February 17, 2007
Why did God make horse flies? In 1728, William Byrd of Virginia had a guess: God made horseflies "that men should exercise their wits and industry to guard themselves against them."...

Toward a Biblical View of Obscenity - February 16, 2007
Elsewhere on the Web, a number of people have taken issue, vigorous issue, with a few posts on this site where I quote other writers using vulgar words. I intend to write something more specific in response to that, but...

Neuhaus's "Pattern of defiance" - February 15, 2007
I'm just now getting around to looking at Damon Linker's expose book on the Theocons, so's I can find out what those First Things folks are really like. I discover that Neuhaus early developed a "pattern of defiance." Evidence? Oh,...

Prayer and study - February 13, 2007
Responding to the Rosenstock-Huessy quotation about prayer and research, Eric Enlow of the Handong International Law School sent this from Simone Weil: "Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations; to win school successes;...

Cooled prayer - February 10, 2007
Prayer, Rosenstock-Huessy says, is "doubtful, agitated, despairing, searching." Prayer desperately seeks answers. When prayer cools into a "residue," it's called "research": "If research is real, it still has the dignity of prayer, although it is the last and most cooled-off...

Freudian slip - February 08, 2007
On page 159 of her extraordinary Rituals of Spontaneity, Lori Branch writes an "if" as an "id."...

Timely words - January 24, 2007
Stahmer offers this useful summary of Rosenstock-Huessy's and Rosenzweig's attack on "objectivity": "For J. G. Hamann, and for all those who have accepted the sacramental qualities inherent in the frailty and tentativeness of human speech, the ambiguities and relativity of...

Ahead of the Curve - January 24, 2007
In their capacity as Sprachdenkern - Speech-thinkers, Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig anticipated a number of developments in philosophy, theology, and hermeneutics. Stahmer writes, "Both Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, but most especially the latter, can now be seen to have been hermeneutical pioneers...

Holes - January 18, 2007
Individualism treats us as splendidly isolated beings, our real selves fountains of ideas and desires but impenetrable to anything from the outside. How ever did we get this idea? By ignoring the body. If the body is at all a...

Anonymous MPs - January 12, 2007
The House of Commons, Rosenstock-Huessy argues, is a body, not a collection of individual units. MPs do not have, as US Representatives and Senators do, individual desks; there is only one table in Commons. And up to the time that...

Old England - January 12, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy points out the contrast between French and English attitudes toward "old" things. Quoting on Boutmy, he says, "'Ancien regime or 'old France' is objectionable in France; 'Old England' is a eulogy." He adds, "To have a 'high old time'...

Life and liberty - January 10, 2007
Jefferson claimed that "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time." But this "us" is a very narrow slice of the human race. As Rosenstock-Huessy says, "The obvious weakness of the new-born child, of the...

Messianic measurements - January 10, 2007
Writing in 1821, John Quincy Adams observed the massive difficulty of introducing metric measurements. Measurement so permeats society that an immediate change in standards would "affect the well-being of man, woman and child, in the community." He noted, "Weights and...

Gnostic bodies - January 07, 2007
Nothing seems as anti-gnostic as the contemporary obsession with bodily perfection. We can remold our bodies in any way we want - tuck in here, enhance there, replant hair and remold biceps, remove wrinkles and signs of aging. In fact,...

Nine lives? - January 05, 2007
Few people today work at the same job throughout their 40 or so years of working life, and many economists and sociologists have pondered the effects of this development. No doubt there is something lost. But there is also gain....

Between, and child actors - January 05, 2007
Everyone lives between times, and is the intersection of past and future. Everyone is always already taught, and always anticipating or actually teaching and ruling. Rosenstock-Huessy writes, "'He' never exists, but is always between two times, two ages, as son...

Rigor - January 05, 2007
I and many of my friends have been criticized for our supposed lack theological rigor. It's meant as an insult. I take it as a compliment. Rigor has its place. But it's not the be and end all of theology....

Politics of sleep - January 03, 2007
Still on Rosenstock-Huessy: "How could we enjoy a restful sleep without social peace? The Gestapo in many countries changes man back to the deer whose sleep is perfunctory and scanty." No political theory, or sociology, can be complete if it...

The limits of loyalty - January 03, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy cites Josiah Royce's The Philosophy of Loyalty as an example of a reductive view of human life. Royce rightly emphasizes the importance of loyalty, but then "could not resist the temptation to explain everything in terms of this one...

On research grants - January 01, 2007
A friend, Jim Rogers of Texas A&M, sent along a rejoinder to my post summarizing Rosenstock-Huessy's views on grant-supported research. He points out that grant support in science and social science is not intended to provide revolutionary break-throughs, but to...

Advice to young scholars, and old - December 29, 2006
In the same 1962 interview, Rosenstock-Huessy has some shrewd advice about the corrupting power of grant money on youn scholars. "If I have to solicit great foundations for money for my research," he says, "then I have to propose something...

Masculine education - December 29, 2006
Rosenstock-Huessay notes that the differences between European and American elementary education have much to do with the fact that "The teaching function in America, until recent years [this from a 1962 interview], had been women's work. All teaching up to...

Childbirth - December 28, 2006
Rosenstock-Huessy notes the difference between animal birth and human childbirth, the main difference being that human parents remain with children after the birth: "marriage means to go from the blind act of the moment, through the whole life cycle to...

Pop Gratitude - December 20, 2006
That Amazon search confirmed my suspicion: Gratitude is a common topic of inspirational literature. You can get gratitude journals, gratitude calendars, gratitude guides, gratitude cards, gratitude with attitude books, probably gratitude mugs and teacups and bumperstickers and bracelets and decals...

Self-thanks - December 20, 2006
Searching Amazon, I find that one Christine A. Adams has written a small book on gratitude for a book series called "Elf Self-Help" (I'm not making this up). Perhaps someone can gently inform Ms Adams that the whole point of...

Things - December 12, 2006
De Zengotita gives this lovely description of his grandfather's (a surgeon) delight in things: "it was his hands that I remember most of all, the care they extended to everything he touched, one by one, no haste, no waste, to...

5 - December 07, 2006
Boethius says in his De Arithmetica that the number 5 represents an infinite circle: "For 5 times 5, which makes 25, starts from 5 and ends in the same number, 5. And if you multiply that by 5 again, the...

Tech Revolution? - November 11, 2006
We are living through a communications revolution. Maybe: While submarine fiber-optic cable is being laid under the world's oceans (according to Anderson, it will be "the largest man-made structure in the world"), about 70% of the people in the world...

German Indians - November 11, 2006
As an example of "cultural hybridization," Walter Truett Anderson describes the residents of the German village of Roderau, where a number of Germans are fascinated with American Indian culture: "the chief Indian in Roderaui is Gerhard Fischer, who prefers to...

In Praise of Coffee - September 20, 2006
An early modern document celebrates the purifying qualities of coffee: Coffee is good for "fat persons whose thickened humors circulate with difficulty." And, it reduces impurities and generally clears out the system: "it restores the stomach, consumes its superfluous humidity,...

Ingratitude and Invention - September 05, 2006
Bacon offers this explanation of the myth of Prometheus: "The next is a remarkable part of the fable, which represents that men, instead of gratitude and thanks, fell into indignation and expostulation, accusing both Prometheus and his fire to Jupiter,...

Antiquarians - August 30, 2006
Of the antiquarians of his day, John Donne wrote: If in his study he hath so much care To hang all old strange things, Let his wife beware....

Queen of the Sciences - August 24, 2006
John Stuart Mill declared at the beginning of his book on logic that "Logic is the common judge and arbiter of all particulars investigations. It does not undertake to find evidence, but to determine whether it has been found. Logic...

Class consciousness - August 09, 2006
Lawrence Stone records the following in his classic Crisis of the Aristocracy: "So deep [was] feeling of a fundamental distinction of ranks that gentlemen did not hesitate to behave in ways which would today be considered base and even cowardly....

Mars Hill Audio - July 29, 2006
Occasionally, I run into people who have never heard of Ken Myers and his Mars Hill Audio ministry. What a tragedy, I think. In case you happen to be one of the darkened multitude, Myers is one of the best-informed...

Therapism - July 10, 2006
Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance. New York: St. Martin's, 2005. 310 pp. PE classes are dangerous places. Dodge ball might leave nasty bruises, and, worse, the frustrations of...

Church discipline - July 08, 2006
It's an old story now, but I just came across it. In a 2002 editorial on the paedophilia/homosexuality crisis in the Catholic church, Charles Krauthammer recounted a story about a priest in Hobart, Australia. Many years ago, a rapist entered...

Schools of Totalitarianism - July 04, 2006
In his novel The Seizure of Power, Czeslaw Milocz describes one Polish character's preparation for life under the Soviets by telling the story of his school experience. At first, Peter wrote and thought for himself; he got bad grades and...

Conservative Culture - June 28, 2006
TNR (July 3) has several articles on conservative culture. Rick Perlstein suggests that conservatism is a "jerry-rigged" coalition that has little ideological unity. But conservative is unified nonetheless: "you never see the sponsors of purity balls going on CNN to...

Gone Missing - June 26, 2006
The library of Dr Daniel Williams (Presbyterian minister, 1643-1716) in London is selling its copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, and to mark the occasion Peter Lindenbaum examines not only the Folio but the library (TLS June 2). The Folio is...

Ritual - June 26, 2006
David Martin comments (TLS, June 16) on Maurice's Bloch's view that ritual crushes human creativity: "No doubt that is how the Jesuits (with their Spiritual Exercises) turned into such scientifically incurious stay-at-homes, how the Mormons built a city in the...

Blogs and the Reformation - June 23, 2006
In a characteristically thoughtful meditation on the strengths and weakness of blogs (on the Books and Culture site), Alan Jacobs includes these reflections from CS Lewis: "As I think about these architectural deficiencies [of blogs], and the deficiencies of my...

St Charles and St John - June 23, 2006
"When the Church and Monarchy were restored on 19 May, 1660, Canterbury and York, being the two primacies of the Church of England, assembled their convocations and canonized King Charles, adding his name to the ecclesiastical calendar in the Book...

How to Stop Religion - May 27, 2006
In his recent book on "religion as a natural phenomenon," Daniel C. Dennett deploys an evolutionary theory of religion in an effort to curb the abuses of religion. After over 400 pages, he is able to come up with this...

Raunch Culture Revisited - May 24, 2006
On NPR this morning, Frank Deford described how, instead of bringing feminine modesty and delicacy to the world of sports as Title IX advocates might have hoped, women athletes have adopted the culture of their male counterparts. Recent hazing incidents...

Raunch Culture - April 23, 2006
Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. New York: Free Press, 2005. 224 pp. "Raunch Culture" involves the mainstreaming of pornography and strip clubs, Howard Stern interviewing topless women, college girls flashing for the camera...

TNR on Neuhaus - April 11, 2006
A couple of weeks back, TNR published a lengthy review of Richard Neuhaus' latest book that expanded into a warning about the danger that Neuhaus and his fellow theocons pose to American democracy. John Wilson has a lively rebuttal to...

Conference - March 29, 2006
If you're in the vicinity of Duke, you might be interested in a conference sponsored by the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, in cooperation with the Duke Divinity School, on May 21-23, at Duke. The theme is "Preaching, Teaching,...

How to Write Science - March 21, 2006
U Aldrovandi organized his treatise on serpents and dragons (mid-1600s) as follows (Foucault's summary again): "equivocation (which means the various meanings of the word serpent), synonyms and etymologies, differences, form and description, anatomy, nature and habits, temperament, coitus and generation,...

Language and the world - March 21, 2006
According to Claude Duret (writing in 1613), Hebrew alone among the languages preserves the original meanings of language, naming the proper essence of things: "Thus the stork, so greatly lauded for it charity towards it father and its mother, is...

Plants, stars, and botonical enmity - March 21, 2006
O Crollius in his 1624 treatise on "signatures" compared stars and plants: "The stars are the matrix of all the plants and every star in the sky is only the spiritual prefiguration of a plant, such that it represents that...

One World - March 21, 2006
Japan beats Cuba in the world baseball competition. According to the NPR report, during the final game, everyone in the stands - Japanese, Cubans, American spectators - does the wave and dances to YMCA by the Village People. After Japan...

Parenthood - March 14, 2006
Katherine Marsh writes in the March 13 TNR that parenthood is not what it was cracked up to be. Instead of bringing fulfillment and happiness, it turns out that parenthood is difficult, and a number of recent articles and studies...

Pigeons - March 09, 2006
Jeremy Narby writes, "pigeons appear to be brighter than many people suspect. One recent experiment demonstrated that pigeons can tell the difference between paintings by Van Gogh and Chagall. The birds received training in which they were rewarded for pecking...

Curry - March 02, 2006
In an intriguing article on multiculturalism, Amartya Sen briefly mentions the international formation of Indian cuisine: "India had no chili until the Portuguese brought it to India from America, but it is effectively used in a wide range of Indian...

When to start philosophy - February 07, 2006
Montaigne wrote in his essay on the education of children, "The boy we would breed has a great deal less time to spare; he owes but the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life to education; the remainder is...

Dylan, Merton, and Maritain - February 06, 2006
Joseph Frank closes his review of two recent books on Maritain and early 20th century Catholicism with this charming scene: "Maritain returned for a last visit to the United States in 1966 to say farewell to old friends and to...

Sermons and such - January 19, 2006
Auden said, "In my opinion sermons should be a) fewer b) longer c) more theologically instructive and less exhortatory. I must confess that in my life I have very seldom heard a sermon from which I derived any real spiritual...

Good Company - January 18, 2006
If Pascal were alive today, he would have a blog. Jonathan Edwards too....

Justification by blame - January 07, 2006
Trollope makes a neat Girardian point in Barchester Towers: "Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves in the right by finding fault with the people against whom they have sinned."...

Design - January 02, 2006
John Thackara's In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, a brief for more human, and more eco-friendly, technology and economy, is full of insights that challenge much of the conventional wisdom about the "information age." A sampling: We do...

Nation of Rebels - November 12, 2005
A few quotations from Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's Nation of Rebels, which are all the more revealing because they come from men decidedly on the left of the spectrum (though, in their terminology, they belong not to the "ameliorative"...

More on coffee - November 11, 2005
Marcus Rench of Cary, North Carolina, sent along the following quotations from H. E. Jacob's Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity. Note that all these quotations are about coffee, not today's expensive imitations - which will remain unmentioned - that...

Coffee - November 10, 2005
Jules Michelet said: "Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly...

Race in the South - November 03, 2005
James C. Cobb cites revealing statistics concerning the self-identification of blacks in the South: "In 1964, only 55 percent of southern black respondents expressed 'warm' feelings toward southerners, as opposed to nearly 90 percent of the southern white polled. By...

Uh, oh, they're on to us - October 26, 2005
In the course of a screed of breathtaking condescension against large families, religion, and conservatism, SFGate.com columnist Mark Morford inadvertently stumbles upon an insight: "Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the...

Hidden Messages of Water - October 04, 2005
Masaru Emoto. The Hidden Messages of Water. Hillsboro, Oregon: Beyond Worlds Publishing, 2004. 157 p. Convinced that Hamlet was entirely correct that there is more in heaven and earth than philosophy (or theology) dreams, I am, out of principle, more...

Cunondrum of the day - September 19, 2005
"Figure of speech" is a figure of speech....

Orwell and English prose - September 18, 2005
In his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell cites this from Harold Laski: "I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had...

Turn of civilization - September 14, 2005
At the end of his wonderful essay on "Art and Sacrament," the Welsh poet and painter David Jones included a fragment that he wrote and rewrote over several decades. Here is wisdom: I said, ah! what shall I write? I...

Wise as serpents - August 19, 2005
From Francis Bacon's De Augmentis Scientiarum, 7.1: "For as the fable goes of the basilisk, that if he sees you first, you die for it, but if you see him first, he dies; so itis with deceits, impostures, and evil...

Me and the Holocaust - August 08, 2005
Dr. Sean M. Quinlan, an Asst. Prof. of History at the University of Idaho, has written an open letter to U of I President Timothy White in which he renews various charges lodged against Douglas Wilson, Steve Wilkins, George Grant,...

Domesticity - August 03, 2005
In an essay in What's Wrong With the World, Chesterton challenges the complaint that home-making is narrow and demeaning for women. On the contrary: "woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when...

The non-revolution - August 01, 2005
In a statistically rich discussion of global trends in family life, Castells notes that in the US "The number of sex partners in the last 12 months shows a limited range of sexual partnerships for the overwhelming majority of the...

Abortion and crime - July 30, 2005
Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that various factors have contributed to the surprising decline in crime rates during and since the 1990s, but among these is the legalization of abortion. According to the reviewer in...

LWA's - July 26, 2005
Byron, a character in Arthur Phillips 2002 novel, Prague (set, of course, in Budapest), presents his theory of advertizing to "LWA's" - Long Wolf Aspirants. Real Lone Wolfs, he explains, "don't respond to advertising, but there aren't more than a...

Arousal and order - July 16, 2005
In Bed and Board, Robert Farrar Capon points out how disordered sexual relations are deeply engrained in contemporary life. Capon wrote the book 40 years ago, but what he says is more true today even than it was then. Men,...

The Gothic - July 16, 2005
Mark Edmundson examines the pervasive influence of Gothic themes not only in popular entertainments (horror movies, computer games, etc) but also in contemporary real-life life. He suggests that the evening news presents a Gothicized world, a world of unknowable threats...

Pity the satirist - May 20, 2005
Michael Budde writes, "Like the Rolling Stones and other major concert acts, the Catholic Church has now taken on corporate sponsorship to underwrite the world tours of its major performer, Pope John Paul II. To finance his 1998 visit to...

Fenrir's bonds - May 13, 2005
The Edda records: "The unbreakable fetters which bound down the Great Wolf Fenrir had been cunningly forged by Loki from these: the footfall of a cat, the roots of a rock, the beard of a woman, the breath of a...

What the New Urbanists Forgot - May 02, 2005
In a fine article in the May 2 Weekly Standard, Joel Kotkin emphasizes the historical prominence of religion in urban life. He argues that "places like Fargo, a booming high-tech city on the Great Plains, are more in sync with...

Salome Factor - April 30, 2005
In the Spring issue of the American Scholar, William Deresiewicz discusses the sexualization of dance during the twelve years he write dance criticism for various publications: "For one thing, dancers have been wearing less and less. Sometimes they don't wear...

Real sex - April 27, 2005
Lauren F. Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005. 175 pp. Chastity today has almost exclusively negative connotations. Being chaste is not activity; it is avoiding a certain kind of action. Edmund Spenser saw it...

And now, a word from our sponsors - April 13, 2005
I've been asked to post this ad for New St. Andrews, and since they be the big boss, I'd better comply. New St. Andrews College and Christ Church-Moscow seek a joint music instructor and church music director for fall 2005....

Booth on Rhetoric - April 11, 2005
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication (London: Blackwell, 2004), 206pp. Since the 1961 publication of his now-classic book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth, an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Chicago,...

Virtues of Tobacco - March 09, 2005
Writing in the 1610s, William Barclay pointed to the astonishing paradoxical benefits of smoking: "Tobacco is hote, because it hath acrimonie; yet, it is cold because it is narcoticke and stupefactiue, it maketh drunken, and refresheth, it maketh hungrie and...

Liber Monstrorum - February 14, 2005
From the anonymous 8th-century Liber Monstrorum, we learn about the following: Astomori: "The accounts of the Greeks say that there are also men devoid of a mouth, unlike all the others, and thus they allegedly cannot eat anything: according to...

Status Anxiety - February 14, 2005
Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety. New York: Pantheon, 2004. 306pp. "Every adult life," Alain de Botton argues, "could be said to be defined by two great love stories." The first is the romantic quest for sexual love and companionship, and...

Neologisms - January 20, 2005
My son Christian is making up words, and I'm hoping to get them into wider circulation. Gauble: n., a bauble of exceptional gaudiness. Chucklement: n., merriment expressed with uncontrollable chuckling. As in, "He was overcome with chucklement." Shrinkle: v., to...

The Outlaw Sea - January 12, 2005
William Langewiesche, The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (New York: North Point Press, 2004), 239pp. Landlubbers that we are, most tend to forget that, as William Langewiesche puts it, "our world is an ocean world." First...

KMart-Sears - December 07, 2004
The Weekly Standard parody of the KMart-Sears merger (Nov 29) is too rich. The parody is a letter purporting to be from a market researcher to the KMart board of directors. Here's a couple of samples: "We recently received the...

Language of Food - November 12, 2004
In his Teaching Company lectures on Chaucer Seth Lerer notes the ethnic and class distinction between terms for game and animals and the terms for the food produced from the game. Deer, cow, lamb, pig are all Anglo-Saxon; venison, beef,...

Articles Translated to Polish - October 19, 2004
For all those readers out there who read Polish: Several of my articles have been translated and published in the Reformacja w Polsce (Reformation in Poland), a quaterly published by Evangelical Reformed Church in Wroclaw, Poland. Bogumil Jarmulak sent me...

Laughter - October 05, 2004
A guest on Ken Myers' Mars Hill audio magazine discusses the humor of The Ladykillers. What, he asks, are we laughing at when we see the plots of criminals return on their own heads? He suggests that we are laughing...

My Life - August 30, 2004
That is, Bill Clinton's My Life, which David Frum reviews in the Sept issue of Commentary. Frum offers the standard (and entirely correct) conservative complaints against Clinton, but commends his understated performance as ex-President. Frum ends on this remarkably hopeful...

Emotional Design - August 02, 2004
Donald A. Norman, Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things (Basic Books, 2004), 257 pp. When Israeli scientist Noam Tractinsky first heard of studies in Japan that ATM machines with an attractive arrangement of buttons were perceived as...

Food and Air - July 16, 2004
Ackerman points to an intriguing phenomenological difference between our dependence on air and our dependence on food. We breathe involuntarily; if we try to suffocate ourselves, we will pass out before we die, and we'll begin breathing again. But (under...

Aphrodisiacs - July 16, 2004
The always-interesting Diane Ackerman gives this wonderful list of aphrodisiacs: "Looked at in the right light, any food might be thought aphrodisiac. Phallic-shaped foods such as carrots, leeks, cucumbers, pickles, sea cucumbers (which become tumescent when soaked), eels, bananas, and...

Lewis on Sex - June 29, 2004
C. S. Lewis has some wise words about sex in the Eros chapter of The Four Loves: "our advertisements, at their sexiest, paint the whole business in terms of the rapt, the intense, the swoony-devout; seldom a hint of gaiety....

Gesture - June 29, 2004
Eve Sweetser of UC Berkeley has a review of a book by Susan Goldin-Meadow in the June 10 issue of Nature. The book is entitled Hearing Gesture and it seeks to answer several questions about the cognitive role of gesture:...

The Body - May 21, 2004
The Winter 2003-4 issue of Image includes an interview with Gil Baillie that includes this nugget: "I've been fascinated by John Paul II's theology of the body, which I think is a tremendously important contribution to the retrieval of God....

Junk Mail Blues - May 13, 2004
Since I subscribe to a variety of magazines and journals, I get a wildly diverse range of junk mail. Some assume I'm Catholic, others than I'm Jewish, some that I'm a Democrat, others that I'm a Republican or Libertarian or...

On Writing - April 04, 2004
Joseph Epstein" has a very funny, and highly critical, review of Alice Flaherty's The Midnight Disease, a book that seeks in neuroscience answers to questions about why writers write and what is happening when they cannot (a book, by the...

Comic Strip Epics - April 02, 2004
A student, Jeremy Downey, has pointed to the parallels between ancient epic and modern comic book heroism. In both cases, you're dealing with men of superhuman strength, who have specialized areas of expertise, and one really cool weapon or tool....

Auden on Originals - March 20, 2004
A comment from W.H. Auden's Dyer's Hand rings true: "All those who success in life depends neither upon a job which satisfies some specific and unchanging social need, like a farmer's, nor, like a surgeon's, upon some craft which he...

Cartoons - March 16, 2004
Cartoons have always been a bit subversive: We root for the rabbit against the hunter, and the carnivalesque characters are always preferable to the law-and-order types that they mock. The underdog roadrunner always triumphs over the predatory coyote. And so...

Shopping - March 09, 2004
The Winter 2004 issue of The Wilson Quarterly has several intriguing articles on shopping and the institution of the shopping mall. The articles cover the rise of the shopping, consumer culture; the strategies behind the arrangement of various departments of...

Air Travel - March 06, 2004
Air travel requires a reversion to infantile behavior, or at best to behavior characteristic of elementary school kids. You've got to stay in the seat, you can't go to the bathroom without permission from the captain or the flight attendant,...

Welcome and Thanks - February 27, 2004
Welcome to my new location. I trust everyone who reads this will think it an improvement over Blogger. Also, I want to offer a hearty, public thanks to Emeth Smith of Tokyo, who designed and set up this site for...

Terry Eagleton and Permanent Things - February 18, 2004
It is a strange feeling to be reminded by a radical like Terry Eagleton of the existence of what Russel Kirk called the permanent things. Writing in Sweet Violence, his recent study of tragedy, Eagleton says "Radicals are suspicious of...

The Etymology of the "F-word" - January 28, 2004
While I'm on that subject: I've often wondered about the etymology of the "f-word." The Shorter Oxford says that the derivation is unknown. I have a theory: Medieval courtly love poetry (such as the Roman de la Rose) traced the...

Civilization and Orifices - January 25, 2004
Becoming civilized is a matter of gaining control over the body, and this bodily control is largely centered, as Mary Douglas recognized, on orifices. Infants have no control over their sphincters: They can't hold urine or faeces, they fart and...

Celebrants USA - January 03, 2004
This morning, NPR had a report on "Celebrants USA," an organization of "Professional celebrants" that designs and officiates at ceremonies of all kinds. The report was about ceremonies of "downsizing," held when someone loses his or her job because of...

James Frey - December 24, 2003
At 23, James Frey had already been a drunk for over a decade, was addicted to crack, wanted in several states, subject to fits of violent Fury, a battered mess. Without knowing how, he ended up in a rehab center...

Glastonbury - December 23, 2003
In offering his nominations for "Books of the Year," Tom Shippey (TLS, Dec 5) tells the following story: "Some years ago a Farmborough biker with an interest in the occult climbed Glastonbury Tor and asked the Goddess to help him...

Lutheran Socks - December 13, 2003
Seen on a pair of socks at the recent Atlanta AAR/SBL convention: "Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders" ("Here I stand. I can do no other.")...

Food and Culture - December 01, 2003
A recent discussion concerning food and culture with some friends provokes the following thoughts: One of the points of the discussion was whether or not high quality food, attention to artistry in making food, is a product of Christian culture....

Schmemann's Journals - November 30, 2003
The journals of Alexander Schmemann were published in 2000 by St Vladimir's Seminary Press, and they are simply mesmerizing. The same rich voice �Ethe same rich soul �Ethat is evident in Schmemann's classic published works shines through in these journals....

Reuther's Conspiracy Theories - November 23, 2003
One would not think Rosemary Reuther would have much in common with the John Birch Society. During an SBL seminar, though, she said "One of the first things we have to recognize is that we have been taken over." I'm...

Cornel West - November 23, 2003
I keep seeing Cornel West at AAR seminars. I recognize him from The Matrix Reloaded. I keep wanting to ask him what Keanu is REALLY like, but haven't mustered the courage....

Thinking - November 01, 2003
Thinking is an odd sort of enterprise. It is spaceless, yet it has certain features of spatiality. For instance: I puzzle over an issue for weeks, making virtually no progress, and then read a billboard or see a preview on...

Oats - October 30, 2003
From Dr. Johnson's dictionary, a definition of "Oats": "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."...

Sacred Cows - October 25, 2003
We speak of "sacred cows," and think that we are using a dead and meaningless metaphor. But the "sacred" of "sacred cow" is very real. Lay a finger on the sacred rights of the individual to do anything he likes...

Taped Sermons? - September 27, 2003
I don't have my sermons taped, and have been asked why. Here's a couple of reasons: 1) Jeff Meyers pointed out a number of years ago that taping sermons tempts a pastor to preach to a group OTHER THAN the...

Sullivan and Reagan - September 23, 2003
On his website, Andrew Sullivan quotes the following statement from the recently published letters of Ronald Reagan:I guess what I am trying to say is that I oppose the dogmas of some organized religions who accept marital relationship only as...

Deus Ex Machina - September 23, 2003
Deus ex machina have a bad rap, but perhaps it's undeserved. What is the gospel but the supreme instance of a deus ex machina?...

Uninterrupted Day - September 23, 2003
Definition: "Uninterrupted day": a) Day in which there are no interruptions; b) (more common) day in which there is no day because the whole things CONSISTS of interruptions....

Animals - September 09, 2003
Joel Garver of LaSalle provided me with the following quotation from Jorge Luis Borges, a quotation that Joel read in a series of lectures on postmodernism this summer: Borges refers to "a 'certain Chinese encylopaedia' in which it is written...

Moneyball - September 05, 2003
Years ago, I enjoyed Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker, a superbly written account of Lewis's years on Wall Street. His latest, Moneyball, is even better. Lewis tells the story of the Oakland A's, and particularly of their GM Billy Beane, and...

Automobiles - August 31, 2003
In his recent book, Seeds of Wealth: Four Plants that Made Men Rich, Henry Hobhouse defends the automobile as an environmental boon. Reviewing the book in the August 15 issue of the TLS, Paul Levy summarizes Hobhouse's argument: In 1900,...

Adam (son of Saul) Bellow - August 29, 2003
Adam (son of Saul) Bellow has written a book in praise of nepotism. Well, du-uh....

Terrorism & Piracy - August 15, 2003
There is a fascinating article in the current Atlantic Monthly about terrorism, business, and piracy on the high seas. William Langewiesche, who did a series of articles for the Atlantic on the aftermath of 9/11, tells some harrowing stories about...

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