I very much enjoyed Armin Rosen’s essay about the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (“Tarkovksy’s Sublime Terror,” October 2023), but I’m afraid he has made an error of fact about Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. Rosen says the protagonist, Andrei Gorchakov, “swallows poison and then . . . . Continue Reading »
Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion by jörg rüpke translated by david m. b. richardson princeton, 576 pages, $39.95 In August of 410, for the first time in eight centuries, the city of Rome was sacked. While the fall of the ancient capital to an army of renegade Goths might . . . . Continue Reading »
When I last visited New Orleans, the Robert E. Lee Monument was being used as an altar. Two voodoo priestesses, turbans atop their heads, scattered gunpowder and grave dirt on the granite plinth. With splendid indifference to those who had erected the memorial, they summoned their gods through an . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m spending time this Lent with the Creed. I hadn’t gotten further than the first sentence before remembering something St. Peter said.“False prophets,” complained Peter, “appeared in the past among the people, and in the same way false teachers will appear among you. They will bring in . . . . Continue Reading »
I posted the letter to the Financial Times where a college professor from India decried monotheism and declared the benevolent goodness of polytheism and its modern ally, secularism. The letter struck me as provocative and worth mentioning in its own right.But now I think I see a . . . . Continue Reading »
A colleague offered me the following piece of correspondence from the Financial Times. It is a letter written by Dr. Gautam Pingle, who serves as a dean with the College of India. He writes:Sir,[unimportant first para deleted] Intolerance bred by the monotheism of the People of the Book . . . . Continue Reading »
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