Reviews and News:
Tolkien’s riddles and religion: Riddles and religious mysteries are not the same. They are mirror images of each other.
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This year marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Here are some book suggestions from Thomas Kidd, Mark Noll, and others.
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Religious art will never die: “Art and religion co-evolved through human history in ways that have generally been impossible to detangle.”
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The Atlantic publishes a piece by a doctoral candidate in comparative literature claiming that the heartbeats of unborn children on ultrasounds are imaginary.
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Art and money: “‘No man but a blockhead,’ Dr Johnson pontificated in the 18th century, ‘ever wrote, except for money.’ He was perhaps correct, although other ambitions applied as well. But what about painters? Did no man but a blockhead ever paint, except for money? When it comes to the plastic arts circumstances change. For Johnson, as for all writers, then and today, the monetary aspect of the occupation fundamentally required sales, as many as possible. However, for a painter all that is necessary is one rich patron. Philip Hook’s fascinating and elegantly written book is a close examination of the history of the art-money nexus and the middlemen – the art dealers – who make the connection.”
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ISIS destroys façade of ancient Roman theater in Palmyra.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Spectator, Simon Jenkins explains why a proposed Stonehenge tunnel is “monumental” foolishness:
“The astonishing has happened at Stonehenge. Some prehistoric force has driven ministers to make a decision. It is to spend half a billion pounds burying the adjacent A303 in a tunnel, to bring ‘tranquillity’ to the ancient place. The result has been a predictable outcry from protestors. The television historian Dan Snow has compared the Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, with Isis in Palmyra: ‘vandals and zealots who destroy ancient artefacts’. Stonehenge drives men mad.
“The stones have for a quarter of a century been as impregnable to change as they have always been to interpretation. Whitehall has been unable to decide what to do with a single-carriageway road which runs 200 metres from the stones and causes hour-long traffic jams in summer. The two-mile tunnel is supposedly a compromise, between local activists who want a five-kilometre tunnel and those who just want improvements to the existing road.
“In her recent history of Stonehenge, Rosemary Hill makes the point that ‘each century rebuilds the stones in its own image, by turns romantic, scientific, counter-cultural’. Such ancestral relics rightly enjoy peculiar protection. But the idea of Stonehenge as tranquil is novel. Tranquillity would never have been its essence. The stones have fallen, risen, been ignored, propped up with cement and hijacked by every loony in the land.”
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Photo: Sunset
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Poem: John Skoyles, “Philosophy 101”
