Reviews and News:
English Catholicism on the brink: “You might expect a book called The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from Bede to Newman, compiled under the reign of King George V, to rustle through the fingers like a necklace of finely-wrought gold. You might expect serenity, monumentality, harmony: a peaceable parade of right little, tight little saints. You might expect that, anyway, if you don’t remember much about English history. The English Way, ed. Maisie Ward, is a beautiful book; but its beauties shine amid chaos and catastrophe. Half of the holy men and women profiled here seem to have believed, with much justification, that Catholic England was on the brink of final defeat. Invasion, corruption, heresy, and persecution—every era gets at least two.”
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Chee-Yun’s buried violin.
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Tim Parks explains his decision to translate Machiavelli but not Boccaccio: “‘Why did you translate Machiavelli, if you didn’t see the point of translating Boccaccio?’ Since I wrote about my decision not to retranslate The Decameron, a number of readers have asked me this question. I had explained that I turned down the invitation to retranslate Boccaccio’s wonderful stories because it seemed impossible in modern English to give the text the life and credibility it has both in the original, but also in John Florio’s marvelous version from 1620. Not only was Florio himself a genius, but one senses that the English of his time was closer than ours to the spirit of the events described; it was drenched in religious reference and he was able to say things easily that seem forced or false in our idiom today. Matters are rather different with Machiavelli, or at least Machiavelli’s Prince.” (HT: Dan McCarthy)
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“Ulysses S. Grant, General-in-Chief of the army that saved the Union and 18th president of the United States, lies today in a vast mausoleum in Manhattan. It is, after Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois, the largest and most elaborate of all presidential resting places, modeled on one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. His sarcophagus was modeled on Napoleon Bonaparte’s in the Invalides in Paris. And yet, as Ronald C. White Jr. shows in depth in his new biography, American Ulysses, Grant was, if anything, anti-Napoleonic.”
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Learned societies of 19th-century England: “Fundamentally, the world of sensory experience is raw and ruthless. Chaos abounds, and events flow into one another without rhyme or reason. There are no clear beginnings or endings; no sense of triumph or despair. There is no Heaven or Hell. At its most innocent, the human mind is overwhelmed easily, subject to the brute forces of nature. Our saving grace, however, is our power of perception: Perception helps us to develop critical and imaginative faculties. These turn into thinking, which can transform the raw materials of the world into dispassionate theories. And yet, a blessing though it is, thought is also finite. The world is tamed temporarily only; theories fall out of use or are superseded by the strange and unexpected. This permanent precariousness can be faced in many ways, yet surely the most admirable combines good manners, a healthy dose of stoicism, and a probing intelligence. This, in a nutshell, is the central argument of William Lubenow’s study of the 19th-century British learned elite.”
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Andrei Platonov, Russia’s forgotten anti-Stalinist playwright.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Christian Century, Philip Jenkins writes about the popular Christian mayor of Jakarta in the world’s largest Muslim nation:
“The world’s largest Islamic nation is Indonesia, where Muslims represent a large majority of a population of some 250 million. Christians make up about 10 percent of that number, and relations between the two faiths have on occasion been rocky. Matters reached their worst in the late 1990s, a time of economic crisis and the collapse of the long-standing military dictatorship. During the chaos, Christian minorities in regions like Sulawesi were subjected to ethnic cleansing and Chinese Christians in major cities were targeted for violence and mass rape.
“In large part, these crimes resulted from economic grievances—Chinese merchants were targeted as scapegoats. Active Islamist terror movements also appeared, with ties to al-Qaeda. For some years, Indonesia seemed to epitomize Muslim-Christian tensions at their most alarming.
“Subsequently, conditions have improved enormously, or rather, reverted to traditional norms of tolerance. Although Christians must be very cautious about any attempts at evangelism, congregations worship openly, and Indonesia is now home to some spectacular megachurches.
“The most encouraging manifestation of improved attitudes is Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, who is commonly known by his Chinese nickname, Ahok. Since 2014, Ahok has been governor of the nation’s capital, Jakarta, a city with a population of 10 million, with some 30 million in the larger metropolitan region.
“As his name suggests, Ahok is of Chinese origin, and his father came from Guangzhou. Like many Indonesian Chinese, this very powerful leader in a mainly Islamic society is also a Protestant, whose wife bears the distinctively Christian name of Veronica.
“The religious element may seem surprising. Under Dutch colonial rule, the lands that became Indonesia were critical to Islamic religious and cultural revival worldwide, and the country became home to some very large mass movements. The Nadhlatul Ulama (NU) claims an astonishing 40 million members, and another group, the Muhammadiyah, has a 30 million. These very powerful groups are socially conservative and deeply involved in politics, but they are utterly different from the intolerant Muslim organizations so often found in the Middle East.”
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Image of the Day: Deer
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Poem: Sally Read, “Tenth Month”
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