Reviews and News:
Matthew Walther goes to a gay rights Ash Wednesday service at a liberal Presbyterian church in New York: “There is something unsettling about liberal Christianity, and at moments like this you feel it: the crepuscular gloom, the all-pervading feeling of desperate but resigned optimism, the hope against hope for something ineffable. You find it in Bultmann, in John Robinson’s absurd—and in their way moving—books, on the lips of Iris Murdoch’s faithless priests. It’s not just sadness; it’s also fear. When Tillich says that ‘Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being,’ he wants us to choose being. The alternative, I guess, is to let yourself be devoured by whatever might be lurking in the gray and black rectangles of half-gloom spreading over the empty pews behind me.”
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Bob Woodward accused of “breathtaking betrayal” in Barbara Feinman Todd’s new book.
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No more celebrity profiles, please.
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In Case You Missed It:
Why you should go to a performance of Bach’s St. John Passion and not just listen to it on a recording: “There is something distorted – one could say, dysfunctional – in the relationship between classical music and recordings…There are, of course, many benefits to being able to access such an extraordinary resource but there are also some dangers. The first stems from the ease with which we become casually familiar with music.”
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Baseball is best on the radio.
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The untold story of the audiobook. In the 1960s the novel was considered too risqué to record.
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What is the function of criticism? Denis Donoghue revisits T. S. Eliot’s famous essay for a partial answer
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Interview: John J. Miller talks with Norman Podhoretz about Making It
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Classic Essay: Hugh Mercer Curtler, “The Myopia of the Cultural Relativist”
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