Norse mythology, unlike the Sacred Scriptures, does not present readers with loving and merciful divinities. The Norse gods are violent boozers, many of whom seem to spend most of their time playing practical jokes and fighting giants. And yet there is a great power to the tales.
If this book had been well-argued and informed by a serious engagement with Christian theology, it might have been a real contribution to contemporary debates about how Christians should engage with politics. Instead, the author relies on caricatures, oversimplification, and fearmongering.
Since the dawn of mankind, men have provided the raw material for human civilization and have ordered an often hostile and fallen world for human habitation. When this impulse is suppressed, the consequences can be grave.
Byung-Chul Han draws attention to the value of things which have been the subject of neglect and indeed vilification for three hundred years in the West: inherited loyalties, roles, and customs.
Mystery frightens us. Big Data offers to explain it away, thereby giving us reliable tools with which to control our lives. It is no great discovery to point out that such tools sometimes fail. Christopher Beha has done something more significant: he has asked why we want them to succeed.
Having thrived for millennia amidst Arab societies despite their inferior status, Oriental Jews were swiftly uprooted in a matter of decades by the Arab-Israeli conflict. A once-in-a-lifetime exhibit at Paris’s Institute for the Arab World attempts to synthesize conflicting narratives of trauma and nostalgia.
The real problem is that something is wrong with the state of science itself. More accurately, something is wrong with the state of academia, in which the system of academic promotion is overly focused on the superficial outcomes of science rather than on the actual meaning and contribution of the findings.
Sadly, Macbeth turned out to be more of a miss than a hit. Livermore replaced the original Scottish setting of Verdi’s opera and Shakespeare’s play with a modern urban gangster war. The idea is far from original. Theater directors have toyed with it for at least forty years, not only with Macbeth but with other operas featuring political power tainted by betrayal and a hint of sexuality.
How do localism and nationalism fit together? How do each of these philosophical approaches to place use and abuse the innate noble feeling of patriotism? Over the course of Chesterton’s story, we are challenged to confront these questions and answer how we ought to live.
Islamic apologetics have, somewhat contradictorily, tended to ally themselves with a secular, Western academic drive to denigrate European culture and Christendom.
Interested readers should know that, in what is billed as “the return of one of the greatest pianists of our time” spanning from Beethoven’s “Appassionata” and Chopin’s “Third Sonata,” Yefim Bronfman will perform a piano recital at the Teatro Auditorium Manzoni in Bologna on February 28, 2022.
This new book by a senior lecturer at the University of St. Andrews is a bracing, short but expansive, study of poetic expressions of the fall of two fabled civilizations.
