Reviews and News:
Banksy paints subversive graffiti on buildings to stick it to the Man. Who gets to keep his work after it has been discovered? The Man.
Well, this is bad news: 314 rare books have been stolen from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library. The missing items include Ptolemy’s Geography, John James Audubon’s The Quadrupeds of North America (1851–54) and first editions of Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). What can you do to help? How about taking a moment to lay one of these medieval curses for book thieves on the culprit(s)?
Anthony Domestico reviews Tim Murphy’s Devotions: “Devotions is a deeply elegiac collection, and there’s hardly a better description of the elegist’s challenge, or the mourner’s suffering, than these lines: ‘What was does not console, / what is, is past control.'”
What do Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminary years reveal about him? He was far more progressive than most people realize, and he was a serial plagiarizer. “As a visiting student at the University of Pennsylvania, he read Kant, Marx, and Gandhi in a course with Professor Elizabeth Flower. Meanwhile, at Crozer he studied under the likes of Kenneth Smith and George W. Davis, who made sure he was steeped in the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr. The social gospel that King would propound in Montgomery, Chicago, and across the land was significantly honed during his time as a seminarian.”
The feminization and decline of Christianity: The president of Union Theological Seminary thinks that the increasing number of female ministers will change how people view God and that this is a good thing. Rod Dreher disagrees: “She’s right…that if females lead congregations, it changes the way you think about God. This is one (but not the only) reason why traditional Christian churches opposes female clergy. God is revealed to us in the Bible as a Father. Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, is a man. Mary, the mother of the Messiah, plays an important symbolic role too. You lose the male and female aspects of the story, you lose sight of why these things matter theologically.”
Behind Reddit’s redesign: “The irony of a dozen designers doing anything at Reddit was not lost on them—the text-heavy website is about as visually appealing as an overflowing email inbox. The designers engaged in some last-minute jockeying over the language of their update, and then they posted it using Reddit’s signature droll tone: TIL Reddit has a design team. The team’s efforts mark the first visual refresh of Reddit in over a decade.”
In the small town of Berryville, Virginia, five miles from the border of West Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley, 100 million books are printed every year.
Essay of the Day:
Is liberalism immune to all attempts to restrain freedom? No, James Poulos argues at Law and Liberty, and the Internet shows why.
“The internet is by far the most dominant and definitive globalizing institution. Its development is in some crucial ways inseparable from the development of contemporary liberalism. For perhaps the most striking example—one we’ll return to later—the internet traces its origins to the attempt to ensure that the machinery of enlightenment would be able to survive even global thermonuclear war. That victory amounted to a sort of liberal singularity. Knowledge and peace were imbued with an almost superhuman character. Now, liberalism could plausibly persist in the aftermath of even the worst—liberals would say, the most illiberal—flaws of humanity’s given nature.
“But if the internet has elevated communicative institutions to the highest tier of prestige, wealth, and power in the liberal world, it has also, just in the most very recent years, revealed a troublingly familiar yet frighteningly different problem for liberalism. In giving unprecedented powers of association and agency to illiberals worldwide, the internet has forced liberals into a deeply ambivalent and highly anxious position concerning the policing of ‘expression’—and, more deeply, thought itself.
“The question is: How can illiberalism be kept from tainting—maybe even overwhelming—liberalism in its heart of hearts, the public space maintained by communicative institutions?”
Photo: Izmailovsky Kremlin
Poems: Giosuè Carducci, “Four Poems”
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