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How Huckabee Might Win
In a brilliant study of the Republican nominating electorate, Henry Olsen identifies four kinds of Republican primary and…
Lenten Culture
As my wife and I pulled up to a fast-food restaurant one year during Lent, our daughter…
A Euphemism for Conspiracy
This seemed to be the week for souring on True Detective. One complaint against Episode Six concerns…
First Links — 2.27.14
False Cheers for Democracy Paul R. Pillar, National Interest Why Read Middlemarch? B. D. McClay, Fare Forward…
Symbolic politics
I reflect on the political potency of symbolism at Canon and Culture, the web site of the SBC’s…
Pity the Subversive
Frank Kermode summarizes Alain Robbe-Grillet’s experimental novel, In the Labyrinth, in his The Sense of an Ending: “the soldier…
Voluntary Impurity
In a contribution to Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law, Leslie Cook helpfully traces the…
Bringing up the Cud
To be accounted clean, land animals have to “chew the cud.” The Hebrew for “chew” is alah,…
High Church Classicism
In a recent PhD dissertation from Florida State, Margaret Armstrong traces the connections between the Oxford movement…
“We are not against modernity, but we are against westernization”
Earlier this month, Penguin Books India agreed to recall and destroy copies of a book by American…
Where Do Our Religious Freedom Principles Come From?
Everywhere we turn these days, we are confronted with issues of religious liberty. Can employers be compelled…
First Links — 2.26.14
The Church Is Changing, But Not How We Might Think Jeremy Zipple, Jesuit Post Modernity Means More…
Coriolanus Alone
Coriolanus didn’t die for Rome’s sins. But there’s a moment early on in Josie Rourke’s production of…
Ritual and Moral Defilement
In his first book, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, Jonathan Klawans explores the complex relations of sin…
Anthropologizing the Anthropologists
In his Taboo, Fritz Steiner observed that the discovery of Polynesian taboo customs was a “Protestant discovery” (50).…
