Reviews and News:
The politics of C. S. Lewis: “He was known to have ‘contempt for politics and politicians,’ in the words of his brother Warnie, and he steered clear of the political controversies of his time. Yet as Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson, associate professors at the University of Missouri and Calvin College, show in their groundbreaking new book, C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, Lewis’s understanding of truth and human nature, of what constitutes the good life and the good society, had significant political implications…Lewis had ‘a very limited view of government’s role and warrant,’ was skeptical of its capacity to inculcate virtue and worried about its paternalistic tendencies. The duty of government was to restrain wrongdoing.” (HT: Hunter Baker)
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The demands of singing Tristan: “A few months after the premiere performances of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” the first Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, fell ill. As he died, he reportedly began to sing fragments of his character’s prolonged death scene. Wagner, struck with guilt, wrote: ‘My Tristan! My beloved! I drove you to the abyss.’ It’s unclear exactly what killed Schnorr von Carolsfeld, but the story that the opera did him in has persisted for a reason. Tristan, which opens the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Monday, is fixated on its characters’ transcendence of their own bodies, and to express this, it places almost superhuman demands on its singers — the tenor in particular.”
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The sinking of the Lusitania and Germany: “There have been so many books about the sinking by a German submarine of the British liner Lusitania off the Irish coast in May 1915 that you may well ask if we need another. Only the Titanic, felled by an iceberg three years earlier, spawned more books. But that resounding call to ;Remember the Lusitania,’ the rallying cry for American involvement in World War I, still reminds us a century later of this particular maritime disaster’s political dimensions. But as Willi Jasper, emeritus professor of modern German literature, cultural history, and Jewish studies at Germany’s University of Potsdam, the author of this unusually thought-provoking book, informs us, ‘it is only Anglo-Saxon writers who have dealt with the subject until now.'”
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The (rarely addressed) difficulty of transgender detransitioning: “The indisputable evidence that transgenderism is not innate is the existence of people who wholeheartedly believe that they need a sex change and then later—often many years later—change their mind and go back. People who have detransitioned, as I have, write to me and tell me their stories and their struggles. They don’t want too many people to know who they are and what they have lived through. They want to live quietly and keep a low profile because they are filled with shame and regret. They are unable to bring themselves to disclose publicly that the transgender life didn’t work out as they had hoped.”
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T. S. Eliot in a letter to Stephen Spender: “I am not concerned with how people behave, but with what they think of themselves in their behaviour; and I believe that the man who thinks himself virtuous is in danger of damnation, whatever line of conduct he adopts.”
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If you watched the debate last night, you may be despairing of America’s future this morning, and it’s true: things look bleak. But maybe there’s still hope. Thomas Donnelly argues that 16th-century England offers an example of how that change for the better is possible: “In ways not dissimilar from 21st-century Declinist America, 16th-century England had reached a low ebb, a fallen imperial power riven by domestic dissent and disorder, driven from its toehold in Europe, governed by an arthritic elite, and unsure which threat from abroad was most menacing. But what is also salient about the later Elizabethan era is that it was a time of renewal, of decline reversed. It may have something to tell us not only about ourselves, for it was the primordial soup from which emerged English-speaking America, but also something about what it takes to escape a downward national spiral.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Montreal Review, A. E. Smith looks at faith and survival in Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich:
“For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Communism was a monstrous cruelty inflicted upon the Russian people. And while he devoted his life, and his considerable genius, to exposing that cruelty to the world, he was – again – more than just a counter-propagandist. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is really an early attempt at developing a philosophy of survival – survival not just in the Gulag, but in the everyday perversity of Soviet life, of which the Gulag is just a particularly egregious reflection. This is a theme that runs through all of his greatest works, from Cancer Ward and The First Circle to The Gulag Archipelago.
“For Solzhenitsyn, the answer did not lie in Western institutions, or Western systems. While he often expressed admiration for the American tradition of personal liberty, he was critical of Western culture. In a 1978 commencement address at Harvard University, he famously excoriated America for its spiritual weakness, its materialism and its vulgarity; its ‘TV stupor and intolerable music.
“As a Slavophile, Solzhenitsyn thoroughly rejected any Western solutions for Russia or for individual Russians living the Soviet nightmare. Instead, he believed that to survive, whether as individuals, as a people or as a nation, the Russian people had to return to first principles, ancient Russian folkways and, particularly, faith in G-d. Indeed, he once summed up his understanding of the root cause of the ‘ruinous revolution’ that, to him, had destroyed Russia: ‘Men have forgotten G-d. That is why all this happened.'”
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Image of the Day: Appenzell
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Poem: Rainer Maria Rilke, “Maybe I Am Travelling”
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