Books & Culture articles from January 2005

Books & Culture archives from January 2005

The Art of Writing.(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Zhang Zhong has a poem on egrets that goes: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] From the deepest depths of the dark sea The egret catches a perch, then wades back. Zhang Wenbao comments, "It is good, but the legs of the egret are a little...

Christian realism.(STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND)
January 1, 2005... Wherever I turn these days, whatever the ostensible subject, I'm likely to bump into someone editorializing about the evils of George W. Bush and his company of wreckers. The New York Times Book Review asks John Ashbery what book of poetry,...

Nihongan Altar.(Poem)
January 1, 2005... 1. The bowls are filled with offerings. One holds the azurite, One malachite--the other things Are unguent, gold, and light-- Or rather, crystals still unsealed By mortar and pestle, Their inner nature unrevealed Like a...

Tears of a Boy, Age Six.(Poem)
January 1, 2005... Waking, he tells his woe About his sister--twelve And slender like a bow, Taut as the silk an elf Is stringing. Glints of light Declare he's lame to halt The arrow of her flight. Birds say it's not her fault. The little...

Rogue scholar.(THE GROVES OF ACADEME)(Obituary)
January 1, 2005... There were a few things that Ginny Brereton couldn't stand: preternaturally clean kitchen counters, rooms without bookcases, absolutely everything about Disney World, and long undisciplined sentences beginning with phrases like "there were."...

The scandal of the evangelical conscience.(Cover Story)
January 1, 2005... Once upon a time there was a great religion that over the centuries had spread all over the world. But in those lands where it had existed for the longest time, its adherents slowly grew complacent, lukewarm, and skeptical. Indeed, many of...

What American teenagers believe: a conversation with Christian Smith.(Interview)
January 1, 2005... Christian Smith is Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. One of the most influential and widely cited sociologists of his generation, he is the author of many provocative books,...

The chastened hopes of the civil rights movement.
January 1, 2005... While virtually every day of the adult life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has been scrutinized, there has been little attention in studies of the civil rights movement to the years following the death of Dr. King, the dispersal and collapse...

Forget me not.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... Few themes in the Bible are as persistent as the call to remember: whether it is God commanding the Israelites never to forget how he brought them out of Egypt, or Jesus telling his followers to eat his body and drink his blood in remembrance...

Love story.(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Atorrid affair, resulting in an illegitimate child and a clandestine wedding, followed by banishment and the occasional book-burning: no, it's not an episode of The Days of Our Lives, but the story of the 12th-century monastics Heloise and...

The gospel according to ...(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... The early church was awash in gospels. Yet early bishops managed to winnow the field, and for well over a millennium, Christendom knew of just four "evangelists." In the gothic chapel of the seminary I attended, they stare down imposingly...

Anglican angst: save the last dance for me.(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Anglicanism sometimes seems like a country with a proportional representation system of government that is doomed, Groundhog Day-style, to be forever in an election year. For the last 150 years or more, Anglicans have subdivided into three...

Atonement: the penal view?(the blood of the lamb)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Do you ever spare a thought for Philipp Melanchthon? In terms of theological controversy, he saw it all, or most of it. There are many good reasons for spending sympathetic time with him, and sympathy is surely never better warranted than...

The lost world of John Clare.(the blood of the lamb)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... If the myth of the Romantic Poet must include single-minded devotion to the muse, a love of nature and its perfections, sensual dalliance, and more than a little dose of madness, then John Clare should be in the first rank, with his...

The real life of an at-home mother.(the blood of the lamb)
January 1, 2005... If modern mothers ever had an enemy, it is June Cleaver. Perhaps more than anyone else in history, June created in us the idea that the good mother spends her day happily meeting the needs of her family. She cooks a hearty breakfast, keeps a...

Families and economics.(the blood of the lamb)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Two quite different books with similar titles bring economics to the subject of romance and the family. Russell Roberts continues his use of fiction to illustrate economics with The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance. He first used this...

The difference the family makes.(the blood of the lamb)(Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200-1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... If you ask the average European woman of child-bearing age how many children she would like to have, you are unlikely to receive the answer "2.1." That number, however, is crucial for European bureaucrats. When women on average bear less than...

Exit smiling: William F. Buckley's long farewell.(the blood of the lamb)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2005... In his own reckoning, William Frank Buckley, Jr., is not an introspective man. A few years back, I caught an episode of the Charley Rose Show in which the emotive host tried to get the writer to imagine something he would have done...

What James Didn't Say about the Tongue.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... That it is almost prehensile, a pink muscle manipulating morsels of fruit, of slander. That you can feel it, right now, tensing in your mouth as it scans the possibilities of tang. That it probes with equal avidity the cavity left...

Nokukhanya's Pickled Thumb.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 1, 2005... At first we said, "it will help to pay for the funeral," Nokukhanya's final gift after an age of pensioned usefulness. Umnqandi did it with a kitchen knife quickly before the thumb was cold. Brandy kept it fresh so that the...

How liberal was it? Gladstone's religion.(the blood of the lamb)(The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... It has been more than a century since the death of William Gladstone, four-time prime minister of Great Britain (1868-74, 1880-85, 1886, 1892-94) and widely regarded as the great Christian statesman of his age. One might have expected a...

The burden of history.(the blood of the lamb)(Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... "It seems to me that the historical study of human beliefs," the British philosopher Henry Sidgwick wrote in 1886, does tend to be connected with a general skepticism as to the validity of the doctrines studied.... [Skepticism]...

Future bound: the greatly exaggerated demise of an American institution.(BOOKS IN A NEW CENTURY)
January 1, 2005... As you walk down Seattle's Fourth Avenue, the new Central Library jumps out at you--literally; its third-story jaw juts out over a ground-level plaza. Encamped amid nondescript beige and black boxy buildings, this gangly greenhouse, designed...

The big muddy: folk artist Richard Shindell sees big stories in small moments.(BOOKS IN A NEW CENTURY)(Sound Recording Review)
January 1, 2005... I am a registered Democrat, consider myself "progressive," and I'm a divinity school graduate who in 1991 marched in a Washington, D.C., anti-war rally, my "No Blood for Oil" T-shirt gleaming white and brand new on my back. I am also the...