The Public Square So it has come to this. Fifty-two years ago, the great Reinhold Niebuhr and a few associates launched Christianity & Crisis in order to counter what they viewed as the liberal sentimentalism of American Protestantism, a sentimentalism that was unwilling or unable to face up to the . . . . Continue Reading »
Saints & Sinners: Walter Railey, Jimmy Swaggart, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Anton LeVay, Will Campbell, Matthew Fox by lawrence wright knopf, 266 pages, $24 Lawrence Wright’s memoir of a few years ago, In the New World: Growing Up With America, 1960–1984, was billed as “a biography of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Under the dome-sky oneness translucent and unincarnate as thought, blank as unburnt light, the hope of thisness chokes in nebulae of beetles, sand grains, hydrogen atoms. Gnosis blurs, pits the achilded One against the unfathered Many. Asks, ‘‘Who could hear each song in the All Song?” . . . . Continue Reading »
Simple Anna liked the words although she didn’t understand what many of them meant. Her man sometimes could make them into worlds where forests shaded green young girls. The girls were always what she was when what she was was what she dreamed. By herself she never dreamed, not . . . . Continue Reading »
You seem to have grasped the point about eviscerating distinctions of any serious content. I am delighted to witness the scenes of domestic discord, and you coached young Bud wonderfully in the donnybrook with Mother Smith. She seems rather shaken, fretting, as any good American must, about whether . . . . Continue Reading »
In the Fall 1991 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly , which is very usefully devoted to the problems of unity and diversity in the contemporary world, Isaiah Berlin observes that the twentieth century is “the worst century that Europe has ever had.” Certainly there is widespread . . . . Continue Reading »
Many great novelists have had intricate, even prickly, personalities. But in Evelyn Waugh, nature and grace worked overtime to produce an extraordinary character, a full understanding of whose complexities would require the combined skills of an archaeologist, a psychiatrist, and a Jesuit confessor . . . . Continue Reading »
In the beginning, Charles Darwin explained how human beings evolved from animals by natural selection. One might have expected that this revelation would have a profound effect on disciplines like psychology and anthropology, and that the newly established link to animals would become the foundation . . . . Continue Reading »
In primal garden the tree stands laden, splendor consummate, grace-rooted, owned by him who warns, don’t eat or sure you’ll die. Yet you, arrogant Adam in us all, grasp prerogatives never due. Thrust out, . . . . Continue Reading »
I trust it did not escape your notice that I have eliminated an affectionate diminutive in my greeting. I am just a bit annoyed that those undamned Smiths in Fremont, Nebraska—whom I have placed in your keeping—persist in tithing. You did succeed in staying Mr. Smith’s hand . . . . Continue Reading »
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