More on: humanism

British artist Chris Ofili has long been a source of controversy. His detractors have included the mayor of New York as well as a man who threw white paint on one of his pieces at the Brooklyn Museum (the famous Virgin Mary piece with elephant dung). But despite the bombast and apparent sacrilege, Ofili’s work…

WHEN DANA GIOIA’S ESSAY “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in The Atlantic in 1991, it galvanized a national conversation about the state of American literature and how creative writing was being taught, produced, and consumed by the reading public. That piece justly propelled Gioia to the front ranks of American letters, not only as a critic but as…

WHEN I CAME HOME from King’s Chapel on the Sunday I published an article called “Returning to Church” in the New York Times Magazine in 1985, I had a message from Kurt Vonnegut on my answering machine. “This is Kurt,” his voice said. “I forgive you.” My becoming a Christian again in mid-life (after many…

Dan Wakefield recently edited a book of the letters of Kurt Vonnegut, with whom he maintained a literary friendship over four decades. Though Vonnegut is often associated with the skepticism and iconoclasm of the sixties and seventies, faith held a mystique for him. At times he called himself a “Christ-loving atheist” and “a Christ-worshipping agnostic.”…

The New Atheist Novel: Philosophy, Fiction and Polemic after 9/11     by Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate (New Directions, 2010) The Children Act by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese, 2014) Fury by Salman Rushdie (Random House, 2001) The Book Against God by James Wood (Picador, 2004)   HEAVY RHETORIC MIXED WITH biblical exegesis and reductive…