Reviews and News:
How the Reformation changed beer: “In the 16th century, the Catholic Church had a stranglehold on beer production, since it held the monopoly on gruit — the mixture of herbs and botanicals (sweet gale, mug wort, yarrow, ground ivy, heather, rosemary, juniper berries, ginger, cinnamon) used to flavor and preserve beer. Hops, however, were not taxed.”
Samuel Johnson warned against mixing theology and poetry in his Lives of Poets: Christianity is “too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestick for ornament.” Modernist poets disagreed: “In the 1930s and 1940s, poets read theologians (and often wrote about them in essays and reviews), and theologians read poets (and reflected upon them in their own writing). Marianne Moore recommended the work of the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth to Elizabeth Bishop and urged Ezra Pound to read Reinhold Niebuhr; David Jones cited Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism as a formative influence and looked to Mysterium Fidei, Maurice de la Taille’s 1921 work of sacramental theology, to help structure his epic poem The Anathemata; and W. H. Auden wrote poems responding to Reinhold Niebuhr’s theological irony and Paul Tillich’s concept of kairos. It’s telling that when T. S. Eliot, one of literary modernism’s savviest marketers, was trying to drum up interest in the Criterion in 1927, he decided to start a controversy over, of all things, the theology of Thomas Aquinas.”
Train named after Anne Frank prompts outcry: “A statement from the Anne Frank House, the museum that preserves the family’s hiding place in Amsterdam, noted that the combination of a train and her name was ‘painful for people who experienced these deportations and causes fresh pain for those who still bear the consequences of those times within them.’”
Last year, the busts of Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson were removed from Stanford White’s Hall of Fame for Great Americans. The result, James Panero argues in The New Criterion, is a less historically rich monument: “The Hall of Fame may be just as notable for its idiosyncratic collection of Americans as it is for the busts on display. It speaks, in a unique way, to the figures of importance in America at the time of their election. Today there are still numerous familiar faces, from Daniel Chester French’s haunting image of Edgar Allan Poe to Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s downturned visage of Abraham Lincoln. Yet there are many Americans along this vaulted empyrean who are now far from household names. How about Hall of Famer Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine (elected 1915)? Or Matthew Fontaine Maury, who charted ocean currents (1930)? Or Charlotte Saunders Cushman, Shakespearean actress (1915)? Or Phillips Brooks, who wrote ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ (1910)? Any visit to the Hall of Fame is an education in American history and in American hagiography—and in American forgetfulness—with the names, quotes, dates, and busts all forming a unified whole. It is within this context that the removal of Lee (1900) and Jackson (1955), and any notice of their long-time inclusion, speaks to a lessening of design and loss of a historical record. Figures in the Hall operate in visual dialogue not only with us but also with one another. Grant looked across the colonnade at Jackson, and Farragut at Lee…”
Is fear good for you? Arthur Brooks thinks so.
Theodore Dreiser in New York: “He was astonished and ‘over-awed’ by the ‘hugeness and force and heartlessness of the great city, its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, the air of ruthlessness and indifference and disillusion that everywhere prevailed.’ Dreiser grew convinced that New York epitomized the Darwinian struggle for existence. In the ‘gross and cruel city’ impersonal forces lifted up the arrogant rich; fire, disease, and winter storms carried off the shivering poor. He wondered why more New Yorkers didn’t protest what Howells had called ‘the perpetual encounter of famine and of surfeit.’”
Stalin at war: “As the Baltic states also fell under Soviet sway, the Red Army invaded Finland. The official version, believe it or not—and many Western leftists did believe it—was that Finland, with a population of four million, invaded the ussr, with a population of 170 million. The Soviets were armed to the teeth while the Finns didn’t even have an air force. A joke at the time told of the Finns asking the Swedes for tanks and the Swedes responding, ‘How many do you need? Just one, or all three?’ And yet, the Finns, mounting a defense on skis, managed for an astonishing time to hold off Soviet forces. They also showed great ingenuity—for instance, posting portraits of Stalin on targets so no Soviet soldier would dare shoot at it. Instead of losing their independence, the way the Baltic states did, the Finns just lost a large amount of territory, which the Russians still occupy. In the process they exposed, for all the world to see, the astonishing weakness of an apparently formidable military. Churchill took note. So did Hitler.”
Essay of the Day:
Are corporations persons? Yes, argues Yishai Schwartz in National Affairs, and they should also be patriotic:
“Despite origins steeped in sovereign favor and national interest, the modern corporation has increasingly seen its capacity for civic duty and engagement diminished. Over time, concern for the national interest has been squeezed out by the twin forces of profit maximization and cosmopolitanism.
“If a company conceives of itself as duty-bound to maximize shareholder wealth, and if its leaders barely see themselves as American at all, what room is left for patriotism? Today’s populist movements — for all of their incoherence, frenzied emotion, and lack of decency — sense this shift, and they are angry.
“They have a point. The turn away from corporate patriotism is in some instances not only a betrayal of national trust, but of the corporation’s origins. It also reflects an incoherent approach to the concept of corporate ‘personhood.’ And yet, that shift is contingent. As demonstrated by the ancient Romans, by Henry Ford’s vision, by SHAMROCK, by Hobby Lobby, and by the actions of AT&T and banks after 9/11, corporate patriotism is not an impossible myth. It is a tradition that can be, and should be, recovered.”
Photos: Tusheti shepherds
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Letter to Belmont”
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