Politics, Culture, Ideas
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Often overshadowed by his fellow Inklings, Tolkien and Lewis, Charles Williams is perhaps the most enigmatic of the trio. This essay delves into his "supernatural thrillers," revealing them as profound explorations of Christian mysticism and complex theology. Discover the incantatory magic of his work, where the Holy Grail, doppelgangers, and Platonic Ideas collide with the suburbs of England...
'Right or wrong, it's my opinion!'—this fierce certainty, fueled by social media's abstracting power, is ripping America's political fabric apart. Forget nuanced debate; today's discourse traps us in echo chambers, where challenging our pre-set views feels impossible. Discover how this retreat from complex realities denies the vital 'coincidence of opposites' essential for a unified nation...
Haim Marantz's essay, 'Remembering Max Weber,' re-evaluates the foundational sociologist, arguing his unique strength lies in methodological pluralism, not a single, unifying master theory like those of Marx or Freud. His influential work spans diverse inquiries, from the correlation between Protestantism and Capitalism to his crucial concept of the "ideal type." The article celebrates Weber's…
Language might seem an essential constituent of identity. It is hard to imagine Winston Churchill orating in anything but English, and Edith Piaf would not have been Edith Piaf in Urdu or Nahuatl. But language is in fact an accident of time and place. Not only are languages always in flux, but few of us determine or control the ones we speak. Pablo Neruda did not choose Spanish as his native…
WAdmittedly, the solution preceded the problem. Or, at least, the practical solution did. This seemed at first provisional. But it helped me to define the fuller ideological problem. About three years ago I began to teach Charlie Chaplin in my course in Modernist poetics and aesthetics, at MIT...
Our university sits comfortably on the west bank of the River Spaarne, as it has for centuries, a fixture of the tidy city of Haarlem. Though smaller and less celebrated than those at Leiden, Groningen, and Utrecht, our school is no less venerable...
Why did the Russian intelligentsia at the dawn of the twentieth century so eagerly join the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, calling for violence and justifying political terror? And why in the early twenty-first century has a significant part of the Western intelligentsia justified mass riots, vandalism, and the transformation of once-thriving cities into ghost towns…
Elaine Pagels recently published what is likely her final work. Certainly it reads like a career summary, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus (2025). We understand her argument better when we recognize that we know virtually nothing of the historical Jesus beyond two facts. It is almost certain that Jesus existed, and that he was crucified following the orders of Pontius Pilate,…
Recently as one of the requirements in my Masters in Writing program at one of the major universities in North America, I took a workshop in memoir writing. It came as a bit of shock...
The keen sense of origin in W.S. Merwin’s poetry, especially in the later work after his move to Hawaii, is and has always been linked to absence, that 'paradise' where things continually vanish from human time...
