Reviews and News:
How much do professors work? No one seems to know.
In Dickens, the choice between tea and coffee is often a choice between good and evil: “‘Tea is often (though not always) part of a comfortable and feminine ritual; coffee-drinking was seen as more vigorous and powerful, thanks perhaps to its caffeine boost, but also to its association with the coffee houses where men gathered to talk politics.’ Perhaps the most notorious coffee-drinker Dickens created is the fraudulent ‘telescopic philanthropist’ Mrs. Jellyby from Bleak House. Utterly immune to the plight of her own children (who are constantly falling down the stairs) or to the travails of sweepers like Jo, she spends all her time drinking strong coffee and supposedly promoting the welfare of Africans in a fictitious realm called Borrioboola-Gha. ‘She neglects her feminine role as mother and wife, whilst she writes coffee-fueled letters long into the night, to promote her coffee-growing charity,’ says Vogler.”
Two scholars claim to have discovered a forgotten source text for several of Shakespeare’s plays using plagiarism detection software: “For years scholars have debated what inspired William Shakespeare’s writings. Now, with the help of software typically used by professors to nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, Henry V and seven other plays. ‘If it proves to be what they say it is, it is a once-in-a-generation — or several generations — find,’ said Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.”
A life of Lansdowne: “Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, fifth Marquess of Lansdowne (1845–1927), personifies the positive qualities of the aristocracy. The reason these people were given fine educations, enormous privileges and almost unlimited leisure was so that they could offer disinterested counsel and dedicate their lives to the public good. If they had something important but unpopular to say, they would be so confident of themselves and their place in society that they would not care about the obloquy that would descend upon them. Lord Lansdowne was such a man. The hatred that erupted following the publication in 1917 of the so-called Lansdowne Letter, which called for Britain to negotiate a peace treaty with Germany, would have crushed a lesser man; for him it was merely the chirruping of the populace.”
Charles Sprawson wrote a celebrated book on swimming, then he disappeared. What happened?
James K. A. Smith on the YouTube-ification of Christianity: “In The Rise of Network Christianity, sociologists Brad Christerson and Richard Flory profile a brand of post-Pentecostalism they describe as ‘Independent Network Christianity’ (INC). Their emphasis is on its unique organizational expression, borrowing the notion of ‘network governance’ from economic and management theory. The acronym INC is also fitting since Independent Network Christianity is marked by distinct forms of finance and marketing. Though not as gauche or brazen as prosperity gospel ministries, INC Christianity is, in many ways, Christianity, Inc.”
Essay of the Day:
Is there such a thing as a “virtuous evildoer”? Gilbert Meilaender muses in First Things:
“At the end of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, the conspirators who had assassinated Caesar, are themselves dead. Brutus has, in fact, fallen upon his sword rather than face capture by the armies of Octavius and Mark Antony. Brutus was bad enough to betray and murder a man who had been his good friend, but he was not bad enough to be a successful rebel. He had parted company with his fellow conspirators, refusing to approve the killing of Mark Antony, and that sense of honor has now cost him dearly.
“After his death, Brutus is praised in the famous words Shakespeare places into Antony’s mouth: ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all.’ There are other ways we might have thought to describe Brutus—as traitor, rebel, assassin, for example—and no doubt one might have used such terms to characterize some of Brutus’s fellow conspirators. But not Brutus, at least according to Antony: ‘His life was gentle, and the elements / So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up / And say to all the world ‘This was a man!’’
“If we ask for a reason why we should praise rather than dishonor Brutus, Antony points to a certain virtue he had displayed even as an assassin. ‘All the conspirators save only he / Did that they did in envy of great Caesar; / He only, in a general honest thought / And common good to all, made one of them.’
“And Octavius agrees. ‘According to his virtue let us use him, / With all respect and rites of burial. / Within my tent his bones to-night shall lie, / Most like a soldier, order’d honourably.’
“In Dante’s Inferno, however, Brutus has a quite different final resting place. Not in the tent of one who would soon be Caesar, but in the nethermost region of hell alongside Cassius and Judas—all betrayers of those (whether in empire or Church) to whom they had been bound by special ties of loyalty. There seems on the face of it no reason to admire or praise them.
“Perhaps we should remind ourselves that Brutus is not the only person who is placed by Dante in deepest hell but whose character may be more complicated than that location would suggest. The character of Judas has, after all, seemed baffling and mysterious to many who have puzzled over the gospels’ accounts of his betrayal of Jesus. So mysterious that, for example, Karl Barth could devote a searching forty-something page, small-print excursus in his Church Dogmatics to exploring the fact that—as Barth puts it—’the more profoundly and comprehensively we attempt to formulate the sin and guilt of Judas, the more nearly his will and deed approach . . . what God willed and did in this matter.’ Judas hands over Jesus, but in so doing he simply does what God has already done. There is, Barth says, nothing here to ‘venerate’ or to ‘despise’; we can only say that in the mysterious working of divine grace, ‘even Judas is not exempt from . . . positive service.’ And we are tempted—perhaps very tempted—to see in Judas a tragic figure, a decent man caught up in fateful, mysterious events well beyond his ken.”
Photos: Kamnik Alps and St. Thomas
Poem: William Logan, “Gods in Dishabille”
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