Books & Culture articles from March 2009

Books & Culture archives from March 2009

The nature of things.(philosophy of life, and works of Lucretius and Boethius)
March 1, 2009... Our story begins--but when does our story begin? With the Big Bang? Or before the foundation of the world? Or... ? In the first century before Christ (I quote from the front matter to Ronald Melville's verse translation of Lucretius' De...

Recommended reading.(Anne Rice's memoir Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession and her religious life)
March 1, 2009... JUST WHEN VAMPIRES BECAME TRENDY again, Anne Rice gave them up. Well... maybe. Few authors have gained the publishing success of Rice, whose 28 books, primarily about vampires, have sold more than 75 million copies combined. At 57, Rice says...

Nunc Dimittis: January 8, 2009.(theologians and writers Richard John Neuhaus and Ogbu Kalu )
March 1, 2009... We began 2009 already aware of unusual life-course conjunctions. I'm thinking especially of celebrations centered on February 12, the date in 1809 when the well-to-do Darwins of Shrewsbury in Shropshire and the dirt-poor Lincolns of Hardin...

Remember the antithesis!(American Reformed Biographies series; Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman )(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... In 2005, P&R Publishing initiated a series of American Reformed Biographies. The series got off to an excellent start with Sean Michael Lewis' Robert Lewis Dabney: A Southern Presbyterian Life, followed by D. G. Hart's John Williamson Nevin:...

The view from the mastaba.(Kenneth E. Bailey's Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... About a year ago, Wheaton College hosted a Christian teacher known for his emergent faith, black T-shirts, and popular cultural explanations of the gospels. We heard all about how Jesus' disciples had to walk "in the dust of his sandals," and...

The sociological two-way mirror.(Pierre Bourdieu's Sketch for a Self-Analysis)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... When Pierre Bourdieu died of cancer in 2002, Le Monde postponed the next day's edition to put news of his death on the front page. It's inconceivable that The New York Times would do the same after the death of a prominent American...

Children's stories: a conversation with Uwem Akpan.(The Hew Yorker, African children, and human smuggling)(Interview)
March 1, 2009... Uwem Akpan was born in Ikot Akpan Eda in Ikot Ekpene Diocese in southern Nigeria. He was educated in Nigeria, Kenya, Nebraska, Washington, and at the University of Michigan, where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree. He was ordained as...

Who counts? A conversation with Jean Bethke Elshtain.(Sovereignty: God, State, and Self and medical ethics)(Interview)
March 1, 2009... University of Chicago political philosopher and maternal feminist Jean Bethke Elshtain has devoted her academic career to pointing out inextricable ties between politics and ethics. Among her many books are Public Man, Private Woman: Women in...

"Every knee shall brighteousness, filthy ow": rags, and a mission cemetery.(Rehoboth, New Mexico, and Native Americans)
March 1, 2009... Not long before he was tapped to serve as secretary of education in the Obama Administration, Arne Duncan, then superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, unveiled a pilot program set to open in the fall of 2009: an urban boarding school,...

Gardening and governing.(William Shakespeare's play, Richard II)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... Just in the center of Richard II, Shakespeare's most geometrically designed play, and the only one written wholly in verse, we are presented with a scene in a garden. Richard's Queen and her ladies stroll in it, but are heavy of heart--the...

Gardening in the cracks.(Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition and Tim Stark's Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... Agiant jalapeno sprouted from a patch of urban dirt next to our patio in Jakarta. There was little to see and less to hope for when my wife rescued this reject seedling--like Christ's mustard seed--from my potted pepper garden and propped it...

Immortal blather.(Flann O'Brien's novels in The Everyman's Library edition)
March 1, 2009... Flann O'Brien was one of the funniest writers who ever put pen to paper. Yes, he set the English novel ablaze with experimental fireworks that still dazzle. He was a brilliant linguist, who wrote Irish and Latin with witty fluency. He was a...

The Emergency.
March 1, 2009... World War II was the last "good" war, or so many people believe. Looking back now, through the lenses of Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, that war was the last time "the free world" could go forward unambiguously to confront an evil foe. Can there...

Public Presbyterianism.(Northern Irish history in the book by Andrew Holmes, The Shaping of Ulster Presbyterian Belief and Practice, 1770-1840)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... One of the more remarkable events in recent Irish history was the formation of a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland in 2007. Unionist Ian Paisley, then head of the Democratic Unionist Party and moderator of the Free Presbyterian...

"For God and Ulster".(Paisley: Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland )(Book review)
March 1, 2009... "For God and Ulster" is a slogan synonymous with Protestant and unionist opposition to the demands of Irish nationalists and republicans. It was the motto of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), formed at the height of unionist opposition to...

Thinking with your hands.(Richard Sennett's The Craftsman on governance and political leadership)
March 1, 2009... I was reading The Craftsman, by the distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett, when then President-elect Barack Obama was selecting persons for his cabinet. The universal response of the media to the cabinet appointments was that Obama was...

King James Reggae.(Poem)
March 1, 2009... The mixed multitude kills time in Kingston airport. Outbound flight delayed by bus wreck on the road. The last paper on the newsstand Sports a white girl's naked breasts. A tropical depression's turned the Trade Wind to...

Dickens in Mumbai.(critical analysis of movie director Danny Boyle's direction and works, particularly his latest movie Slumdog millionaire)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... When British director Danny Boyle hits his mark, no matter the genre, hardly anyone moves a story better. That is surely the case with Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, the dazzling, if predictable, tale of an teenaged slum kid who by wild fluke...

Dark planet.(Klaatu and the messianic undertones in the different versions of the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... The alien messiah is a staple of science fiction, and few have been as messianic as Klaatu, who came to Earth to deliver a message of peace and a warning of possible apocalyptic doom in the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still...

Now what? Revivalist Christianity and Global South politics.(The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... Across three great regions of the world--sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and southern and eastern Asia--two trends are rearranging the social and political landscapes. One of these, the growth of democracy in civic life, politics, and...

The ministry of Ezekiel Guti.(Christianity in African in the book African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... In the 1960s, isolated researchers began speculating that Africa could become a major center of Christian population by the end of the century. For decades this apparently extravagant prediction was noticed by few outside the small world of...

Homegrown.(African Pentecostalism: An Introduction and African Christianity)
March 1, 2009... Addressing the African Colonization Society in 1880, the gifted African nationalist Edward W. Blyden (1832-1912) declared, in pointed reference to Psalm 68:31, that "Africa may yet prove to be the spiritual conservatory of the world...; for...

Honorable revisionism.(books A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, and Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship discussed)
March 1, 2009... When I was a graduate student and the crust of the earth was still warm, we looked forward every week to an announcement by our professor of American history of some brilliant "revisionist" book demanding our immediate attention. If the topic...

A family quarrel.(Saving the Holy Sepulchre: How Rival Christians Came Together to Rescue their Holiest Shrine )(Book review)
March 1, 2009... The subtitle of Raymond Cohen's instructive book might more accurately read, "How Christians Nearly Destroyed Their Holiest Shrine." The battle over the supposed location of Calvary and Jesus' tomb has raged for two millennia, beginning with...