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The Fall of Declinism
Monday May 12, 2008
Is everything going to hell in a handbasket? Down the tubes? Into the crapper? Or is life getting better every day in every way? Do you believe in progress or regress? What, exactly, does your handbasket look like? The older I get the more interested I am in people’s convictions about the directionality of culture.
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Do Dictators Have Anything to Fear from Musicians?
Thursday May 8, 2008
Last December, I wrote a speculative piece for First Things Online, regarding the upcoming visit of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to the People's Republic of North Korea. I was responding to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the critic Terry Teachout, who thought that such a visit would constitute a serenade for Kim Jong-Il, and a betrayal to that tyrant's victims....
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The Evil That Men Do
Wednesday May 7, 2008
Among oxymorons in common usage, one of the most popular is “victimless crime.” It would seem that if an act is criminal in nature, it must have a victim. If there is no victim, then the act cannot be a crime in any real sense. When the phrase is used, a larger point is being made, as the speaker means to imply something arcane and puritanical about a certain “offense” being considered an offense at all. Generally, the concept involves....
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Love in the Ruins II – Why Does God Permit Suffering?
Tuesday May 6, 2008
For most of the week it has been raining. On Pascha we raised our candles—Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen!—and ate our lamb, sprawled out with friends drinking wine and eating sweet spicy tsoureki bread for hours, and fell early and exhausted into bed, the rain still thudding outside.
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A Gadfly in Gilead
Monday May 5, 2008
Just when we thought that the saga of Jeremiah Wright was largely behind us, here it is again front and center with an appearance by the widely reviled pastor at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The day after John McCain breaks his silence on the matter and says....
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Current Issue
Issue 57
The sculpture of Richard Serra, Franz Wright on the Gospels, interview with Ron Hansen, fiction by Pinckney Benedict
Good Letters: The Image Blog
