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Bilbao Alone

Some of the sounds here are familiar: Vivaldi plays the same in this language, keys rattle in locks, the engines of buses sigh as they turn street corners. But something is different, an odd solitude. It digs itself under my watch into the small bones of my wrist. Here in . . . . Continue Reading »

History According to the Village Atheist

The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century by forrest g. wood alfred a. knopf 517 pages, $29.95 I remember one of those 2:00 A.M. college bull sessions that gave a much younger me the beginnings of an education. On that night, we were . . . . Continue Reading »

She Turned to Me

She turned to me one night as if to say: “I know.” And though I waited for her words as we Walked along the outside path of cobblestones And grass, her eyes instead made effort to Explain her inner thoughts and fears. Pain, I knew she’d meant to share aloud. Had . . . . Continue Reading »

An Old Radio in Atlantic City

It drew people to it like a fire,The needle floating up and down its dial,Fishing for the news. It was a horror house,A band-stand, Europe in flames,A dummy and his master. AmongThe cloudy mirrors and calendars,The radio knobs are toys now,The beasts have been dragged out;No tankers hug the coast at . . . . Continue Reading »

Letters

OK, David Horowitz, I get your drift (“The Radical Paradigm and the New Racism,” November 1990). I too wish that certain religious, academic, and media people would stop giving so much attention to the flake-left movements. I too think their proposals are more than merely wrong, that such . . . . Continue Reading »

Theology Through the Looking Glass

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice has been having quite a run through the Garden of Live Flowers. “I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!” she says. “There ought to be some men moving about somewhere—and so there are!” Alice gets excited . . . . Continue Reading »

Leaping Headfirst Into the Smith Trap

ichard John Neuhaus has joined the chorus of those singing a lament to the death of religious liberty (“Polygamy, Peyote, and the Public Peace,”October 1990). The cause of the choir’s mournful tune is the Supreme Court’s decision in the so-called peyote case, Employment Division v. . . . . Continue Reading »

“J” in Bloom

The J of the title was discovered in 1711 by Henning Bernhard Witter, an obscure Lutheran pastor of Hildesheim, so obscure, in fact, that his role in the naming of this source of the Pentateuch was only rediscovered in the present century by the French biblical scholar Adolphe Lods. In the writings . . . . Continue Reading »

Race and Urban Politics

Most Americans have the sense that something went terribly wrong in the nation’s big cities sometime in the middle of the 1960s. Since then, urban areas have been perceived essentially as centers of social problems, even social pathologies. Urban affairs have become a continuing tale of rising . . . . Continue Reading »

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