Reviews and News:
In the West, all copies are viewed as inferior to originals. Not so in Japan and China: “The Chinese have two different concepts of a copy. Fangzhipin are imitations where the difference from the original is obvious. These are small models or copies that can be purchased in a museum shop, for example. The second concept for a copy is fuzhipin. They are exact reproductions of the original, which, for the Chinese, are of equal value to the original. It has absolutely no negative connotations. The discrepancy with regard to the understanding of what a copy is has often led to misunderstandings and arguments between China and Western museums.”
Red Granite Pictures, the producer behind The Wolf of Wall Street and Dumb and Dumber To, to pay $60 million to the U.S. government in Malaysian corruption case.
The New Musical Express (or NME) is closing its print publication after 66 years. At Spiked, Neil Davenport explains why: “Having long given up on probing think-pieces or riotous, on-the-road interviews, the later-years NME left its readers with little more than Top 10 lists and 50-word album reviews.”
Sam Wollaston calls Peter Hitchens a “Christian zealot” for saying that the novelist Philip Pullman wants to undermine Christianity. Hitchens: “I am a soppy, broad-church Anglican who dislikes any sort of religious enthusiasm or sectarianism…Surely, it is Mr. Pullman, with his self-declared hostile intent towards the Church, who is the zealot.”
Roger Scruton has been named New Urbanism Fellow at The American Conservative. His first piece in that role is a critique of modern skyscrapers: “The modern skyscraper has no skyline: merely a blunt fist thrust above the city, without grace or courtesy. It has no façade at street level, but merely an opening somewhere, marked if at all by some garish logo, and surrounded by characterless steel and glass.”
The Big Lebowski is 20. What do critics who panned the film when it first came out think of it now?
Essay of the Day:
David Hollinger argues in his new book, Protestants Abroad, that the world changed Christian missionaries more than Christian missionaries changed the world. Is that right? John Wilson reviews:
“Hollinger’s book will be read, cited, and argued with for years to come. Many of its most engaged readers will be people like myself, with missionary connections, who are deeply interested in the story he has to tell yet who find their shared experience only intermittently reflected in his narrative.
“That sense of dislocation begins before the book has even been opened. There are hundreds of millions of Christians spread across Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania. Some of these were Christian long before the coming of the modern missionary movement. Many who have become Christian more recently have been converted by indigenous churches. But from the 19th century to the present, the impact of missionaries has been enormous, and many of those missionaries have been American Protestants. Clearly, both for better and for worse, they did change the world; Hollinger’s distinctive contribution is to show aspects of that influence at home. To acknowledge the one is not to deny the other. Why then the subtitle asserting the opposite? Just a bit of hype? No, because (as we’ve seen) Hollinger doubles down on this assertion in the first sentences of his first chapter.”
Photo: Hallstatt
Poem: James Matthew Wilson, “James’s Book”
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