N. T. Wright has written a biography of Paul the Apostle. Actually, make that a “reconstruction” of the life of Paul. That leads to some problems: “The bulk of this lengthy volume traces Paul’s travels and discusses his letters in the setting of those travels. The chapters, titled after Paul’s geographical locations, include discussion of the letters Paul wrote from those locations. This approach allows Wright to harmonize the letters and Acts as much as possible and also to speculate on correlations between the content of the letters and Paul’s experiences in the various locations. The results are sometimes striking, sometimes illuminating, and frequently speculative and creative.” It gets worse when Wright tries to tell us what made Paul tick: “For example, the Paul who wrote Galatians 6:14–15 might be surprised to learn that his ‘deep inner sense of what made him who he was’ was that ‘he was a loyal Jew.’”
Most of Richard Wagner’s prose is unreadable, but there are two exceptions: His letters and libretti. “His complete prose works have been translated into English only once, by the dauntless and mad William Ashton Ellis, and although everyone who mentions Ellis’s work rightly deplores it, no one can face the prospect of doing the job again… When it comes to the texts for his dramas, the situation is quite different. His own estimate of his poetic gifts varied, but he was, with very small exceptions, a consummate dramatist. When one contemplates the four-part drama of Der Ring des Nibelungen, for instance, and compares it to the multifarious sources in Teutonic and Nordic myth and legend from which he extracted and remade it, no degree of admiration is adequate.”
List: Medieval wellness tips: “For a man who’s been painfully beaten…make the patient a bed in a pile of steaming horse dung, and lay him in it.”
The city of Matera in southern Italy will be the 2019 European capital of culture. Is it ready? It’s inhabited by Italians. What do you think? “After the celebrations…people began to wonder, ‘and what the hell are we going to do now?’”
A number of writers have complained about or protested Ian Buruma’s departure at The New York Review of Books. In The New York Times, Laura Kipnis writes: “Mr. Silvers and his longtime co-editor, Barbara Epstein, became legends by taking editorial risks; Mr. Buruma became an ex-editor by taking editorial risks. No doubt they all made their mistakes. Mr. Buruma gave an interview after the publication of the Ghomeshi essay that came off as cavalier about the omissions in the piece, fanning the controversy. Do we now live in such unforgiving times that one problematic essay (or interview) guillotines a job? If so, my fear is that no editor in America will be taking editorial risks ever again. Whatever one thinks of the Ghomeshi essay — my purpose isn’t to defend it; I understand why many found it sniveling and dissembling — I suspect that The Review’s parting of ways with Mr. Buruma will change the nature and content of intellectual culture in our country…What’s painful about the stance of many now claiming the #MeToo mantle is the apparent commitment to shutting down voices and discussions that might prove distasteful or unnerving. What use is such an intellectually stifled version of feminism to anyone?”
Another sharp critique of Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West: “‘There is no God in this book.’ So begins Jonah Goldberg’s sprawling tome, Suicide of the West. When my daughter gave me the book for Father’s Day, she proudly declared that it is ‘The most important book written in the twenty-first century.’ Let’s hope she is wrong.”
Essay of the Day:
Christian support of Israel is often dismissed by liberal journalists and social scientists as “an apocalyptic movement, a Right-wing political grouping.” In reality, Sam Haselby writes at Aeon, it is the most successful interfaith cooperation of the twentieth and early twenty-first century:
“Christian Zionists are seeking to enact what they consider the values of Jewish-Christian cooperation in political and religious terms. Starting with a specific political issue – the wellbeing of Israel – Christian Zionism structures the interfaith relationship in its service. The movement is built to make the case that this goal is vital to evangelical Christians and their identity.
“Christian Zionism projects a specific vision of God’s covenantal guarantees and their eschatological fulfilment. In short, it makes God’s promises and their scope more certain, more selective, more exclusive in understanding God’s dealings with humanity. This specificity sets Christian Zionism apart from other interfaith movements, and goes far in explaining its affinity to a certain understanding of Jewish identity.
“The issue in which this specificity pays interfaith dividends is in securing Jewish possession of Israel’s covenanted land. The ‘land’ consists of the sites of biblical history and the biblically mandated borders that God in Genesis grants to Israel’s patriarchs. For Christian Zionists, these make up the ideal borders of the state of Israel and include the contested West Bank.”
* * *
“Like most American Jews, Israeli Jews differ with American evangelicals on a host of religious, cultural and political issues, from the economy to abortion to women in combat service. The cultural differences between evangelicals and Israelis are vast. Yet Christian Zionism shows that shared values need not be the basis of interfaith cooperation. The evangelical-Zionist bond has faced great challenges and has lasted by clinging to a very narrow set of shared interests. Yet the ideas underpinning Christian Zionism shape both evangelical identity and Israeli understandings of the US.
“This is far from an endorsement of Christian Zionism. Criticisms of the movement’s politics, theology, tendency toward apocalypticism, ignoring and ignorance of the Palestinian experience and interests, anti-Muslim stereotyping, and near-unquestioning allegiance to Israel are all worthy of discussion. But Christian Zionism should not be misrepresented. A fundamentally interfaith alliance has informed and propelled Christian Zionists into the very halls of power. They have succeeded, in a way few interfaith movements have.”
Photo: Bled
Poem: Anthony Thwaite, “So Easy, So Hard”
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