Reviews and News:
The legacy of that other Elizabethan playwright, Ben Jonson.
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Austin City Council to force arts organizations that accept city money or use city property to recognize labor unions.
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Dana Gioia’s names: “By naming mundane life with care, poetry draws attention to and celebrates the way the world overflows all referential demarcations.”
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The first cultural relativist: “Johann Gottfried von Herder is not exactly a household name, and many of the few who know him may think of him chiefly as the eighteenth century philosopher who originated the nationalist conception of “the Volk” that the Nazis ran with and turned into their notion of Aryan racial purity.”
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In Case You MIssed It:
The myth of the Andalusian Paradise: “In an exhilarating and unput-downable read, Fernández-Morera debunks the fashionable myth that Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together (convivencia) under ‘tolerant’ Muslim rule. He prefaces each chapter with a quote by scholars, politicians and respected publications extolling the Andalusian paradise. World-class academics — hailing from Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, London, Oxford — look like fools in their apologetics for jihad: the violent Muslim conquest of Spain euphemistically described as a ‘gentle migratory wave’.”
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Bruce Fleming skewers the modern dogma of “linguistic realism”–the idea that language is the only reality–and its politics
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Christianity and the free society: “While many Christians have undermined human liberty, a new book of essays shows just how much of our contemporary freedom we owe to the Christian church, Christian thinkers, and Christian practice.”
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How Thomas Merton found freedom in constraint: “Though Merton was baptized in the Church of England and attended Catholic and Anglican schools, he grew up to be religiously agnostic. In high school, he defiantly refused to recite the Apostles’ Creed during chapel and found faith instead in ‘pamphlets and newspapers.’ He fancied himself an intellectual and acted like it. In college, he dabbled in Communism, became a pacifist, wrote for literary publications, flirted with a lot of women, drank a lot of alcohol, and read a lot of D. H. Lawrence. But his freewheeling lifestyle failed to bring him fulfillment. ‘If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it,’ he wrote, ‘I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.’ What he was, though, was a shallow young man with an inner life that was a mess of raging appetites and desires.”
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Classic Essay: James Q. Wilson, “Liberalism and Purpose”
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Interview: Ben Domenech talks to James Rosen about William F. Buckley, the Beatles, and more.
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