August 6th, 2007
The always interesting Camille Paglia gave the Cornerstone Arts lecture at Colorado College in February 2007, and it has been reprinted online.
Here’s an appetizer:
I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American ine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian [...]
June 10th, 2007
Mark Oppenheimer has an intriguing review of Stephen Prothero’s new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (HarperSanFrancisco) in the most recent New York Times Book Review. The thesis of the book is that Americans, even Evangelicals (who we often imagine as having the Bible memorized), are woefully ignorant of the [...]
May 29th, 2007
I’ve spoken before on this blog of the pleasures to be had from audiobooks. Indeed, if it weren’t for the books I “read” while taking walks, I’m not sure (with my too sedentary occupation) I’d get any exercise at all.
Personally, I use a cheap MuVo, and subscribe to audible.com. But here’s perhaps a reason [...]
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Joan of Arc: A Life (Penguin Lives) by Mary Gordon
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The concentration resulting fom a framework of theology and philosophy, [T.S. Eliot] says, is one of the reasons ‘why Dante is a classic and Blake only a poet of genius.’ The intellectual disorder of the nineteenth century gave the poet no such system, indeed it imposed upon him the necessity of being at once an artist and an original speculative thinker—an impossible combination. Thus the effort to construct for himself a workable plan out of the odds and ends of the wreckage of philosophical systems not infrequently resulted in grotesque and unsteady structures, the early collapse of which left him a prey to despair and frustration.
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Kelly Hatzenbihler on 