Redemption is Possible
Ruth is about all those components of a nation: family, clan, townsmen, the interaction of citizens and foreigners, and all of these acting in relationship to the law, or to God’s words. “It is a prosaic story of ordinary life… whose raison d’être is to enact the sanctification of everyday life in the home, on the land, and with one’s neighbors.”
Africa Rising
Although Sub-Saharan Africa holds 60% of the world’s not-yet-cultivated arable land, food scarcity is a top concern, particularly in view of the worsening climate crisis.
Gambling, Debt, and Literary Fortune
Dostoevsky lost everything at the Wiesbaden casino, but the episode seemed to finally reveal to him the true depth of his habit, that it threatened not only his marriage but the life of his wife.
Climate of Violence
Our intelligence is multiple, fractured, and spread across billions of people and thousands of institutions.
What a Nation Isn’t
Recognizing the distinction between unity and uniformity—between, on the one hand, a national unity made up of divergent traditions and, on the other, an unrealistic national uniformity that is rarely manifested except during brief, unsustainable periods of patriotic enthusiasm—is an elementary prerequisite for cultural history and analysis.
Against Linear History
To be modern is to privilege the present over the past.
The Land, the People, and the Law
Coke and Selden understood that law is also to be understood as part of a nation’s history.
A Sketch by God the Painter?
When in the fourteenth century a French knight displayed to pilgrims what he claimed was the blood-stained shroud of Christ, naturally that discovery attracted a great deal of interest.
Bringing the history of Naples back to life in a great public art museum
With over 150 opera costumes from the San Carlo opera house, many of them on mannequins, and more than 300 porcelain objects from the Royal Factory of Capodimonte, this was a very Neapolitan exercise in its overstimulation.
Dave Hickey Now
Oppenheimer’s introduction tells the story of Hickey’s unrealized book project Pagan America—a country of a “large, secular, commercial democracy,” united by shared icons across cultural strata.
Recent String Quartets
The stillness of Shulamit Ran’s high harmonics, and fragments and sequences of unrelated materials, seem to represent the disjointed, depleted nature of mind when confronted with the destruction of the bodily self.
Religious Heresy, Liberalism, and Political Philosophy
By not knowing, the recent positions taken by political philosophers over the nature of justice repeat, but superficially so, those much earlier theological arguments over sin and free will.
How To Think Outside, Around, In Between, and Beyond the Box
From metaphor to material, humankind has used containers of some sort for the past 200,000-400,000 years.
Better Lives Through Reading
Reading opens us up to a topsy-turvy, funhouse-mirror, Alice in Wonderland universe where we follow in wonder every hint of the hero, intermittently puzzling over what our author is doing.
Love, Envy, and Revenge
Titian invites us to empathize with antiquity and to humanize it.
Like Magic
A book arrives to readers already finished. If we allow ourselves to be mystified as we age, we might wonder at the object in our hands.
Aeneid Wars
French departments do not stop teaching French literature after Moliere and Racine, Italian departments do not stop teaching Italian literature after Dante and Petrarch, so why do almost all classics departments feel they have no duty to study and teach Latin literature after Juvenal, Martial and Seneca?
