Reviews and News:
The word “masterpiece” used to refer to the single greatest work by an individual artist. Not any longer.
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A history of Baptists in America: “Baptists began as a sectarian movement characterized by a powerful sense of dissent, primarily against religious establishments and privileged state churches. Baptist theology and praxis—autonomous churches, priesthood of the laity, distinct conversion experience, believer’s baptism, and a rabid egalitarianism—challenged the sentiments of more connectional, hierarchical Christian groups. But Baptist success in evangelization, coupled with their democratic polity, drew large numbers of adherents. This growth increased cultural privilege, which for some Baptist groups led to a growing support for the social and theological status quo.”
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British losers: “When some 20,000 Zulu warriors attacked unexpectedly from the north, using their favorite tactic of encirclement, British superiority in weaponry and discipline was ultimately overwhelmed. Facing certain death, these ‘last stand’ soldiers fought with a grimly impressive tenacity. They exemplify heroism-in-defeat, an attitude to impending disaster in which many Britons continue to take a peculiar pride. The plucky loser, trying one’s best with a stiff upper lip: Part of being British is to relish setbacks, the more dramatic the better.”
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Medieval cities discovered in Cambodia.
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Visiting Japan’s 111-year-old stationery store.
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A history of the public park.
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Anthony Daniels on the “degeneration” of Melbourne: “It has been thirty-four years since I was last in Melbourne, and physically it has not improved in the long interval. I remembered it as a handsome, if not characterful, city; now I was aghast as I walked down Swanston Street, one of its principal thoroughfares, at what had been done to it. It was like a vast open-air museum of modern architectural pathology, waiting for UNESCO to declare it a world heritage site. It was not that insufficient money had been spent on it; on the contrary, it was that the architects had tried too hard.”
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Essay of the Day:
Richard John Neuhaus wasn’t a cultural warrior, Matthew Rose argues in the latest issue of National Affairs. He was “a defender of a consensus”:
“At the time of his death in 2009, Richard John Neuhaus had been a public figure for nearly four decades. To admirers and friends, he was arguably the most influential American Christian intellectual since Reinhold Niebuhr or John Courtney Murray. The New York Times described him as a ‘theologian who transformed himself from a liberal Lutheran leader of the civil rights and anti-war struggles in the 1960s to a Roman Catholic beacon of the neoconservative movement of today.’ It was a conventional biographical arc — Neuhaus’s life was defined by exchanging the ideals of liberalism for the dogmas of religious traditionalism.
“But that story is misleading, if not worse, since it distorts the convictions of a man wholly defined by his convictions. Neuhaus spent his life contending for the soul of the liberal tradition. Conversions great and small marked his career, and he often quoted Cardinal Newman, saying that ‘to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ But his commitment to political liberalism, far from being a youthful error he later repudiated, was one of his life’s few consistent threads. The other was his orthodox Christian faith.
“The key to understanding Neuhaus is to see him as a defender of a consensus, uniting commitments to both Christianity and liberalism, which he believed to be rooted firmly in American history and the truth about human society. Its central proposition, which Neuhaus defended in over 20 books and hundreds of articles, holds that American democracy depends on the moral beliefs and practices of religious believers. Neuhaus paired this with a second and more original thesis. He held that liberalism is itself endangered by those discouraging traditional religious voices from public deliberation. Secular liberalism is not a tautology, he maintained; it is a contradiction.
“Neuhaus was this movement’s sharpest critic and keenest observer, as evidenced by his 1984 book, The Naked Public Square, which examined the cultural conflicts that would define our politics for a generation. Neuhaus did more, however, than foresee the rise of secularist politics. He undertook the long work of articulating an alternative ‘public philosophy’ and assembling an ecumenical network committed to its refinement and dissemination. Liberalism, he proposed, is founded on truths embedded in the American experience that can be discerned by any reasonable person: that human beings possess powers of rational deliberation, that these same powers make human community and self-government possible, and that both are grounded in the rights we possess from nature and God — the ultimate ground of human freedom and limited government.
“More than half a decade after Neuhaus’s passing, the growing estrangement of both left and right from his vision makes it worth revisiting — and perhaps proposing anew.”
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Image of the Day: Bettmeralp
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Poem: Bart Sutter, “Grand Casino”
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