Books & Culture articles from May 2009

Books & Culture archives from May 2009

Decline and fall.(STRANGER IN STRANGE LAND)(influence of "fall of Rome" on trends on book publishing)
May 1, 2009... If your thoughts are running to decline and fall--though I can't imagine why on earth they should be--you might want to hunker down with Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell, just published by Yale University Press. One of Goldsworthy's great...

Recommended reading.(BOOKS&CULTURE)(World Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West)(Brief article)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... ANTHONY GRAFTON is an eminent and prolific historian who writes for the general reader as well as for his peers. World Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, recently published by Harvard University Press, gathers a number...

Present and not yet.(George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... I have vivid memories of the 1947 Gordon Divinity School faculty family Christmas party. My missionary father, on extended health leave as he recovered from four years as a POW in China, was filling in for Paul King Jewett, then completing...

A backslider's tale.(Holy Roller: Growing Up in the Church of Knock Down, Drag Out; or, How I Quit Loving a Blue-Eyed Jesus: A Childhood Memoir)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... Diane Wilson's Holy Roller is a memoir of a Pentecostal childhood in the tough shrimping community of Seadrift on the Gulf Coast of Texas, but it is also a true-life murder mystery and, as the subtitle says, the record of growing up to "quit...

And can it be? Charles Wesley gets his turn.(Charles Wesley and the history of Methodism in England)(Essay)
May 1, 2009... I look out my office window in Vancouver at a mountain that appears singular and imposing. From experience, though, I know that if you drive up that mountain, you will find that it distinguishes itself into two equally impressive peaks. In fact,...

Terms of engagement.(essay writing and interfaith relations)(Essay)
May 1, 2009... In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my grandfather was an active member of his local branch of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, best known for sponsoring National Brotherhood Week (the inspiration for Tom Lehrer's satirical song of...

Generation k.(Religion and Spirituality in Korean America)(God's New Whiz Kids?: Korean American Evangelicals on Campus)(Korean American Evangelicals: New Models for Civic Life)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... Eight years ago, when I first arrived in the United States to go to college, student life staff put me through a two-day crash course in assimilation. Though I grew up just an hour over the Canadian border, pamphlets about food etiquette and...

Beyond platitudes: a model for civic leadership that takes religious pluralism seriously.(With God on All Sides: Leadership in a Devout and Diverse America)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... Susann, an exchange student from Germany, approached me recently after class. "Why are Americans so concerned about the private lives of their leaders?" she asked. Referring to a chapter we recently read about President Bill Clinton's affair...

Civility and boldness.(The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... When I visited her university as a high school senior, my sister eschewed collegiate bacchanals and took me to an event that left an indelible impression. We went to a dark auditorium in which a pro-life organization showed films featuring...

On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
May 1, 2009... The art historian James Elkins tells of his experience as one of four jurors for the 1990 exhibition "Revelations: Artists Look at Religions." It was a big show with several famous artists in it, including Andres Serrano, the maker of Piss...

Wanted: Intellectual Hospitality
May 1, 2009... James Elkins has a refreshingly irreverent take on the current art scene, and he's pulled back the veil a bit on the last taboo: religion in contemporary art. The answer he offers to the implicit question posed by the title of his book--what is...

Re-emergence.
May 1, 2009... In the reemergence of Christianity's presence in art, 2007 was a remarkable year. In its year-in-review, Artforum, a preeminent contemporary art magazine that has been inhospitable to issues of religion, named Gerhard Richter's stained glass...

Strange Similarities
May 1, 2009... Although James Elkins admits that "once upon a time--but really, in every place and in every time--art was religious," he thinks we're past that. Today, the only kind of religious art that can be accepted in the art world is marked by "irony,...

Estranged or Divorced?
May 1, 2009... We "religious" should be grateful to James Elkins. His book clearly states what artists who are Christians may have learned by experience, but never heard honestly acknowledged. The "place" of religious art turns out to be off any map whose...

James Elkins Responds
May 1, 2009... I've been gratified and intrigued by the amount of discussion my book has provoked. I regularly receive invitations from Christian institutions to talk about the issues in the book. (I have particular enjoyed visiting Lipscomb University and...

Exceptionalism with a twist.(From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... Americans have always struck outside observers as being a bundle of contradictions. Europeans from Tocqueville on have noted how, in the strange world across the Atlantic, forthright materialists are consumed with spiritual ardors while the...

Good intentions.(Crusader Nation: The United States in Peace and the Great War, 1898-1920)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... Defining the spirit of an age has never been easy. Still, American historians looking at the first two decades of the 20th century have not been shy about characterizing this critical period. While the years between the Spanish American War and...

Culprit-in-chief.
May 1, 2009... It was mid-January, 1862, and a Baltimore dentist was writing grudgingly to his clergyman brother, first to congratulate him on the birth of a son, and then to chide him for his hostility to the administration of Abraham Lincoln. Yes. Lincoln...

The founder of American literature.(James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... This volume, the first installment of a projected two-volume study of James Fenimore Cooper, covers Cooper's life from his birth in 1789 to his departure with his family in 1826 for an extended sojourn in Europe. What Wayne Franklin, director of...

Wise man of the American West.(The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner)(Wallace Stegner and the American West)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... The centennial of Wallace Stegner's birth (1909-2009) is upon us. Two books and a documentary film provide valuable glimpses of his major importance as a writer and environmental activist. They also correct mistaken notions about Stegner. ...

Old mortality.(Katherine Ann Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... On a recent trip to Washington, I zoomed through the National Gallery of Art at about Mach 5. It wasn't my idea to do it that way. Left to my own devices, I might have spent long days soaking in the masters and swiping packages of crackers from...

Captive audience.(The White Tiger)(Book review)
May 1, 2009... Read Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, and a month later, maybe less, I suspect that you will remember this novel only impressionistically. You will remember having enjoyed it. You will remember that it took place in India and that its narrator,...

Downsizing.(managing home libraries)(Essay)
May 1, 2009... I had it all planned. After more than thirty years serving on the faculty of a Christian college just outside Boston, I would head to the sunny Gulf Coast of Florida. My days would begin with early morning spiritual and physical activity, then...