The New Pantagruel The New Pantagruel

Hick Con

Tex rose up through a black sleep, startled and awake, but desperately keeping his eyes closed. The dream again. He took a deep cleansing breath, flushing out guilt and other toxins. The hum of mut...

An Open Letter to Comment

I am very disappointed with Al Wolters' "insider" response to Comments' series, "NeoCalvinism... Yes, No, Maybe?" including but n...

Will in the Void: Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespeare

Reviewed in this essay: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt (Norton, 2004), 430 pp., $26.95. In the sixteenth century does not begin, as is conventionally phrased, a separation or differentiation of politics from a religious context; what actually begins is the elimination of the life of the spirit from public representation and the corresponding contraction of politics to a secular nucleus. In this process again we cannot distinguish clear-cut phases; we can speak only of a trend toward such contraction. ---History of Political Ideas, vol. 5, Religion and the Rise of Modernity, vol. 23 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1998): 23-4. The psychological boundaries by which the old culture had sought to understand the nature of man and predict his behavior were useless when he was no longer inhibited by the pressure of traditional community; and, experienced concretely in a more complex setting, human acts proved too ambiguous for neat classification. […] When man still clung to the old culture, he seemed to have become, in spite of himself, a trespasser against the order of the universe, a violator of its sacred limits---literally no man’s land---he had been conditioned to avoid. But his predicament was even worse if this experience had taught him to doubt the very existence of boundaries. He then seemed thrown, disoriented, back into the void from which it was the task of culture to rescue him. And this, I suggest, is the immediate explanation for the extraordinary anxiety of this period. It was an inevitable response to the growing inability of an inherited culture to invest experience with meaning. ---William J. Bouwsma, "Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture"

"Only a Man Harrowing Clods:" Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America

For most fashionable American intellectuals, the life and work of the poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry represents something of a scandal. Of course, it is understood to be a scandal in i...

On What is Not Forgotten

"'All manner of things shall be well'; for He wills that we be aware that the least little thing shall not be forgotten." --Julian of Norwich1 "But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God." --G. K. Chesterton2 "The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught." --Henry Adams3 I.

Response to Hayes on Syriac Poets

After reading Micah Hayes' recent essay, "The Early Syriac Poets and Cognitive Science," I would sugges...

Cake-Walk

Jimmy Lavender cut a dashing figure with his matador pants and bouffant shirt with frills. He did an elegant Paso Doble with show-stopping Chasse Cape maneuvers, but it was the ever-present air of ...

Lifewords: A Review of Philip Rieff's My Life among the Deathworks

Culture is the form of fighting before the firing actually begins." So reads the first of countless bold pronouncements about culture, authority, and identity to be found in Philip Rieff's first fu...

A Review of Roman Catholic Political Philosophy by James Schall, S.J.

Review of Roman Catholic Political Philosophy, by Fr. James Schall. Published by Lexington Books. Hdbk, 209 pgs., index, bibliography, notes. ISBN: 0-7391-07745-3 "The Devil seeks two things: first, to rob the Christian of his Joy, and second, to rob God of the worship due him." --Martha H. Cheeks, in conversation, March 14, 2006

Deconstructing the Cathedral

At first, it looks like the typical tangle of tourists debarking from busses at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. But the crowd is larger than the usual mix of pilgrims and panhandlers, and the...

Shooting J. R.

Margaret opened the front door and looked into the living room. She readied a pleasant smile. But it was only Kathleen in the room, wedged into the corner of the window seat, hiding, Margaret decid...

Return from Bohemia: Grant Wood and the Promise of American Regionalism

So there we were, my wife, Lucine, our then-nine-year-old daughter, Gretel, and I, driving the gravel roads outside Clear Lake, Iowa, following directions like "first fencerow past the big grain bi...

Psychological Man: Eros and Ambition in Democratic Desire

In early June 2006, ISI Books is publishing a reissue of Philip Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic. This will mark the 40th anniversary of the book's 1966 release. An introduction is included by E. Lasch-Quinn, and there are two critical essays to be included, one by Wilfred McClay, and the following essay by Steven Gardner. Although Freud denied the divine, he did not deny his own divine capacity---to theorize. Before theorizing was distinguished from theologizing, to theorize was considered a way of seeing God. Now it is considered merely a necessity, something men are compelled to do if they are to become god-like. --Philip Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic This escape into a conceit of freedom, as if there were nothing sacred, poses a nice contrast with the fact that every great revealer, Freud included, must depend for his creative power on the concealing character of his vision, the blindly obedient eye of it. [...] The final truth of Freud's vision is in the one thing he will not see, except in delicately balanced distortions and at safe distances, hidden behind newly acceptable surrogates. --Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist Introduction

The Early Syriac Poets and Cognitive Science

A Look at Their Surprisingly Similar Views on Mind/Body Unity and Metaphor "Who hath known the mind of the Lord?" the apostle asks; and I ask further, who has understood his own mind? Let those tell us who consider the nature of God to be within their comprehension, whether they understand themselves -- if they know the nature of their own mind. -- Gregory of Nyssa, from "On the Making of Man"

Theocracy as a Parlor Game

Psychological literature is chockablock with case histories of people who suffer from irrational fears, and the run-up to midterm elections in a lame-duck presidency is a fine time to add another o...