Books & Culture articles from January 2002

Books & Culture archives from January 2002

The Scandal of Arming America. (Stranger in a Strange Land).(Arming America: Origins of a National Gun Culture)
January 1, 2002... Readers who go back with us as far as September/October 2000 may remember the cover story of that issue, in which I reviewed Michael Bellesiles's book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. I was badly wrong in my judgment,...

Muhammad Through Christian Eyes: Demonic charlatan or moral exemplar? The church's mixed response to Islam's prophet.(historical research)
January 1, 2002... Those who have discovered C.S. Lewis's enchanted universe of Narnia might recollect its terrible Empire of the South: Calormen. There, beyond the Great Desert, dwell a "wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel" people, who pray to Tash, a bloodthirsty...

Kandahar: Mixing fiction and documentary, a film from Iran explores the Taliban's heart of darkness.
January 1, 2002... There haven't been all that many films about Afghanistan. In the waning days of the Reagan era, when the mountains and deserts of that country proved as difficult for the Soviets as the jungles of Vietnam had been for the Americans, the land...

The Female Body Politic: Jane Addams and the dream of American democracy.(A Life)
January 1, 2002... "Most Americans of middle age or older," Jean Bethke Elshtain observes, "have heard of Jane Addams. Didn't she have something to do with immigrants and social work?" Founder of Hull-House, the pioneering Chicago settlement house inspired by a...

Let's Get Personal: Yes, the church needs to get past modernity's impersonal techniques. But adding the prefix "post" doesn't solve anything.(A New Kind of Christian)
January 1, 2002... If you've been to a conference on the state of the church in the last five years, chances are you've heard it said that while we live in a postmodern world, the church is still largely stuck with assumptions and practices shaped by modernity....

"They Don't Write Them Like That Anymore": Really? Richard Rodgers, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the fate of American musical theater.(The Life of Richard Rodgers: Somewhere For Me)
January 1, 2002... The first biographies of Golden Age theater composers tended to be American Masters-style valentines written by members of the family's outer circle. The results were pleasant but left much to be desired as serious engagements with their...

The Beauty of Borrowing: Contemporary artists in dialogue with the past.
January 1, 2002... "On seeing Giorgione's style," wrote Giorgio Vasari, "Titian abandoned that of Bellini, although he had long practiced it, and imitated Giorgione so well that in a short time his works were taken for Giorgione's." So Vasari, the...

The Prophet's Pulpit: A conversation with Patrick Gaffney illumines the world of Muslim believers--what they have in common; what. divides them--and the varieties of Islamic preaching.(The Prophet's Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt)(Interview)
January 1, 2002... In theory, Islam is a religion without a clergy. On the ground, things look different. Before Patrick Gaffney decided to pay attention to Islamic sermons in the late 1970s, no comprehensive study of contemporary Islamic preachers existed. He...

All Shook Up: The inner world of early Pentecostals.(Heaven Below)(Review)
January 1, 2002... During 1906 and 1907, the headlines that lured American readers to pore over newspapers while sipping their morning coffee occasionally described startling local religious excitements. In April 1906 the Los Angeles Times alerted its readers...

Of Poetry and Polyspermy: The natural history of human reproduction.(On Fertile Ground: The Natural History of Human Reproduction/Making Babies: The Science of Pregnancy)
January 1, 2002... It was the spring of the year and of my first pregnancy. My silhouette was just beginning to round out to the point where planting was awkward but not unmanageable. I settled my knees into the soil and sowed a patch of violas. As I buried the...

Tolkien Canonized.(J.R.R. Tolkein: Author of the Century)
January 1, 2002... Growing up in the Middle-earth of American evangelicalism, I received the full Tolkien treatment. My parents read The Hobbit to me before bedtime, and I read it again many times on my own. I ventured through The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a...

Maya Mysteries: There's power in the blood in the ruins of Copan.
January 1, 2002... "Picture a square bed sheet," my informant instructed. "The four corners are the four cardinal points. Now picture four heavenly creatures holding each of the corners: The creature on the northern corner is white; the one on the east is red;...

Is Globalization Christian?(Globalization and the Kingdom of God)
January 1, 2002... For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. --1 Timothy 6:10, NIV It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest." ...

"Not First in Words but in Flesh": Language and truth in the Christian literary tradition.(People of the Book)
January 1, 2002... It has been remarked with wry hauteur that literary criticism is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. This conclusion was presumably the product of observing that for someone who is clever and has time on his or her hands, a piece of...

A Geography of Reading: Huxley lambasted it. Darwin was made uneasy. The masses devoured it. A biography of a book. (Science Pages).(Victorian Sensation)
January 1, 2002... Books have biographies. Like people, books have lives that can be told and stories that can be recounted. James Secord's Victorian Sensation is an extraordinary example of a new genre of scholarship that might appropriately be dubbed the...

The Warden of Time and Space: Part 3: Summing Newton up. (Science Pages).(Isaac Newton: Eighteenth-Century Perspectives)
January 1, 2002... In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a...