Prufrock: John Stott Bowdlerized, Classic Tom Wolfe, and More

Reviews and News:

John Stott’s classic Basic Christianity has been updated “to respond to sensitivities relating to gender. The result, as Barton Swaim shows, is a mess.

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How did sociology become so politicized? Looking at the life and work of the eminent Nathan Glazer offers some answers.

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Revisiting Edith Wharton’s Fighting France: “An advocate of American intervention, Wharton hoped through her writing to galvanize American public opinion on behalf of France and her allies. Fighting France has often been characterized as propaganda and not accorded the same respect or status as Wharton’s other writing; in an attempt to bring renewed attention to Wharton’s wartime writing, and to offer a critical reappraisal of it, Alice Kelly has edited this admirable new edition on the centennial of its publication.”

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Germany grants Turkish request to allow comedian Jan Boehmermann to be charged for insulting President Erdogan in a poem: “Turkey demanded last week to have comedian Jan Boehmermann prosecuted for insulting a foreign head of state. German law required Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to grant permission before prosecutors could consider whether to press charges. Merkel stressed on Friday that it ‘means neither a prejudgment of the person affected nor a decision about the limits of freedom of art, the press and opinion’.” (HT: Phillip Terzian)

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In Case You Missed It:

Salvador Dalí’s Zionist paintings: “The paintings were commissioned by Shorewood Publishers in 1967 for the 20th anniversary of the state of Israel. The set is comprised of 25 mixed-media paintings highlighting important religious, historic and political moments in Jewish history.”

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Christopher Hitchens’s faith: “Hitchens was also a contrarian to himself. His public persona was contradicting the conventional views he found all around him, conventional believers and unbelievers both, but that public persona was also contradicting a much more reflective Christopher, one who was considering certain ultimate questions much more carefully than he could afford to let on. As Peter Hitchens once told me, the reason Christopher’s city walls were so heavily armed, bristling with weaponry, was that if you ever got past those walls there were no defenses from there to the city center.”

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Marjorie Perloff on Susan Howe’s quest for “the plain sense of things.”

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Revisiting Robert Penn Warren’s prescient All the Kings Men: “It remains a salty, living thing. There’s no need for literary or political pundits to bring in the defibrillators. It is also eerily prescient, in its portrait of the rise of a demagogue, about some of the dark uses to which language has been put in this year’s election.”

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Classic Essay: Tom Wolfe, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died” (via Contemporary Thinkers)

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Interview: Bill Kristol talks with Robert P. George

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