It is the rare reader of fiction who does not at some time or other consider becoming a writer. It comes and goes over the years for many, and some carry it about forever as an unredeemed promissory note to themselves. In their heart of hearts, they regard themselves as writers. When my first novel . . . . Continue Reading »
That Austen recognized the absence and failure of the Church in combating individualism makes her a public theologian to reckon . . . . Continue Reading »
Some of the greatest Modernists, including the painter Georges Rouault, the poet T. S. Eliot, and the composer Igor Stravinsky, found in the language of abstraction, fragmentation, and primitivism ways to reconnect ancient religious truths with the conditions of the modern . . . . Continue Reading »
Twenty-five years ago when there was still a Communist East Germany, I interviewed several boys from Leipzig’s Thomanerchor, the choir once led by Johann Sebastian Bach. Many of those children came from atheistic homes. “Is it possible to sing Bach without faith?” I asked them. “Probably . . . . Continue Reading »
However much traditional standards are leveled in our late democratic society, American theater will persist in challenging putatively oppressive values and the figures who enforce them. So I concluded after seeing Wit, the play by Margaret Edson that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and is . . . . Continue Reading »
The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold Warby hilton kramerivan r. dee, 398 pages, $27.50 In the summer of 1952, Hilton Kramer’s life took a fateful turn. While attending a program known as the “School of Letters” in Indiana—where he had gone . . . . Continue Reading »
Anyone interested in improving relations between men and women today and tomorrow must proceed by taking a page from yesterday. For today’s tale regarding manhood and womanhood is, alas, both too brief and hardly edifying. True, as they multiply taboos on speech and gesture, our sexual harassment . . . . Continue Reading »
It should have been easy for Herman Melville to hate Manhattan—the “Babylonish brick-kilns of New York,” as he wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851. It was there in Manhattan he was born in 1819, at 6 Pearl Street, down by the Battery, while his ambitious, hard-driven father busily bankrupted . . . . Continue Reading »
Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theologyby graham ward cambridge university press, 258 pages, $54.95 The Gift of Deathby jacques derrida, translated by david wills university of chicago press, 115 pages, $18.95 Though Jacques Derrida is perhaps France’s best-known living philosopher, his . . . . Continue Reading »
Now that researchers at George Washington University Medical Center have split human embryos, thereby producing genetically identical twin embryos, cloning human beings is on the table for national debate. Reactions to the event at George Washington have been varied. Some people (the Vatican, . . . . Continue Reading »
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