Reviews and News:
Painting after Caravaggio: “Beyond Caravaggio, which invites us to consider European painting in the wake of the artist’s death, at 39, in 1610, demonstrates how hard it can be to get beyond Caravaggio. Most of all, beyond The Taking of Christ, which was only rediscovered in 1990 in a Jesuit seminary in Dublin. Around it the National Gallery has assembled a show that is oddly persuasive”
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A history of the medieval Wound Man: “The Wound Man image was a convenient way for medieval surgeons to navigate their texts, but it was also an arresting reminder for both practitioners and patients of the vital knowledge contained within such manuscripts. It was living proof of the efficacy of the surgical enterprise”
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Why are some astronomers so desperate to believe in aliens? “To this day, the scientific evidence that life exists anywhere beyond Earth remains what it has always been: zero…At the moment…every life form we know of is descended from a single common ancestor — and therefore, unless and until that changes, the probability is that life has originated only the once here on Earth. Everything about its emergence and subsequent evolution, as Matthew Cobb makes clear in an essay devastating to the easy assumption that life might be common across the universe, was a concatenation of staggering improbalities.”
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Amazon tests grocery store with no physical checkouts: “Customers tap their cellphones on a turnstile as they walk into the store, which logs them into the store’s network and connects to their Amazon account through an app. The service is called Amazon Go. It uses machine learning, sensors and artificial intelligence to track items customers pick up. These are then added to the virtual cart on their app. If they pick up an item they later decide they don’t want, putting it back on the shelf removes it from their cart.”
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John Wilson’s favorite books of 2016.
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Michael Dirda’s holiday picks.
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Emily Barton revisits Marly Youmans’s Catherwood: “In most stories, lost people return in the end to where they started. That is the arc of the ‘lost person’ plot, which bends toward home, however much that place or concept has changed with absence. Hansel and Gretel eventually make it back. So does Odysseus. But Catherwood’s fate is different. It’s as if, in telling a story of the New World, Marly Youmans wants to make that world entirely new. The whole rest of her novel—all its uncharted territory—lets Cath wander.”
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“John Rodrigo Dos Passos (1896-1970) is a writer with an expansive view of man, of human reality. Besides being a literary craftsman, he is a historiographer of American culture and values.”
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Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Russell Moore answers the question: “Can the Religious Right be saved?”
“The religious right—whether we trace it to the school prayer skirmishes of the 1960s or the segregation academy controversies of the 1970s or the response to Roe v. Wade and the sexual revolution—was always a multifaceted coalition. After all, Jerry Falwell adopted Paul Weyrich’s language of a ‘moral majority’ because the movement encompassed not just born-again Protestants but also many traditional Roman Catholics and Latter-day Saints and Orthodox Jews. But while the movement was in many ways informed by sources such as John Paul II’s theology of the body and Richard John Neuhaus’s The Naked Public Square, the entrepreneurial energy almost always came from Evangelical Protestantism. For that and other reasons, American Evangelicalism is enmeshed with the religious right psychologically, institutionally, and in terms of reputation in ways the Catholic bishops, the Mormon apostles, and Orthodox rabbis just aren’t.
“The fate of religious conservatism is important, though, and not merely for its own sake. Ross Douthat is quite right that America—left and right—needs a strong religious conservative movement. The religious right, at its best, modeled the kind of civic engagement and civil society that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton wanted for this country. At its best, the religious right reminded all of us that there are realities more important than political or economic success; that we are a nation under God, one that can be weighed in the balance and found wanting. At its best, the religious right kept the focus on a vulnerable minority that easily becomes invisible to those with power: unborn children. Douthat is correct that without some form of religious right, the space left behind can all too easily be filled by European-style ethno-nationalism or Nietzschean social Darwinism. The religious right must, in some form, be saved. But how and in what form? That question, of course, brings us to the 2016 presidential election.”
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Image of the Day: Church of Saint Tomas, Slovenia
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Poem: Mark Amorose, “Contra Mundum”
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