It’s remarkable how often de Lubacian themes come up in political discussions nowadays.
Kahn: In calling citizens to sacrifice, “Political rhetoric affirms that in the life of the nation, we never die. We are assured of a kind of secular resurrection: he who believes in the nation shall never die. Calling it secular, however, only refers to its institutional form. In itself, it is a form of faith as deep as that of any religion. Political rhetoric is the contemporary language of transubstantiation . . . . In the popular sovereign, we do not die, despite the death of the body. The popular sovereign is the contemporary mystical corpus of the state.”
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…