Reviews and News:
In 2012, New Testament scholar Karen King presented a papyrus seeming to indicate that Jesus was married. “Jesus said to them, My wife,” it says. The papyrus’s authenticity was challenged almost immediately, however, and not merely by traditionalists. In The Atlantic, Ariel Sabar examines its chain of ownership, and what he finds does not inspire confidence in the document’s authenticity.
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Robin Lane Fox’s St. Augustine “doesn’t convert to Christianity; he converts to whatever it is you get to experience when you put your worldly ambition behind you and give up your sex life.”
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“The Making of Tocqueville’s America is historian Kevin Butterfield’s provocative account of how [America’s] culture of association developed. It shows that the rise of associations in post-Revolutionary America was dramatic – and not easy. Americans disagreed vigorously about associations’ virtues and vices, their powers and limitations. These questions are abiding, not simply historical, as the recent debate about whether religious organizations should be able to get exemptions from the so-called ‘contraception mandate’ makes clear. Butterfield’s book is valuable for any American who wants to think seriously about private organizations’ rights and responsibilities.”
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“Penguin’s iconic Modern Poets series, which was first launched in the early 1960s with the writings of authors from Lawrence Durrell to Stevie Smith, is being revived this summer to introduce a new generation of poets.”
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For years, churches have been falling all over themselves to attract “millennials.” Please, writes a millennial, just stop.
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Richard Vinen, professor of history at King’s College London, considers four books offering widely differing interpretations of the European Union.
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If anybody could write a series of aphorisms and commentaries on the ways in which technology resists attention, that person would be Alan Jacobs.
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Essay of the Day:
With our technological devices, we hold greater power over our environments than ever. Yet we don’t control our time. We are controlled by it. Stuart Whatley explains.
“Some scholars believe that boredom is a modern condition – a byproduct of the standardized “clock time” ushered in by industrial capitalism, starting in the 18th century. Paradoxically, time-use studies in recent decades find increased boredom in leisure activities, a finding akin to the ubiquitous complaint of “busyness” in an era of unprecedented technologically driven productivity and automation. Productivity-enhancing technologies don’t make us any less busy because they are too often designed and marketed not to free us up, but to enable us to take on more – more work, and more entertainment. Similarly, a body of recent research into how we actually experience time indicates that the technologies defining leisure activities today – particularly video and social media – do not necessarily result in time well spent; to the contrary, they are perpetuating the ennui of 21st-century leisure life.”
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Image of the Day: Edinburgh Castle
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Poem: Stevie Smith, “Not Waving But Drowning”
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