“A Dutch version of the popular television program Antiques Roadshow has uncovered what is believed to be a previously unknown work by 17th-century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Younger.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Giving New Meaning to the Word ‘Scripture’
“Christian book publisher Zondervan says their next edition of the Bible will be handwritten – by more than 31,000 Americans.”
Head of Nobel Literature Committee Thinks US Can’t Compete
“Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States…The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.” (The head of the U.S. National Book Foundation replies, “Put him in touch with me, and I’ll send him a reading list.”)
The Man Who Was Right About Almost Everything
John Stuart Mill “believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the common intelligence of all the races of mankind.”
Young French Muslims Find Freedom of Religion in Catholic Schools
“Some of the country’s 8,847 Roman Catholic schools have become refuges for Muslims seeking what an overburdened, secularist public sector often lacks: spirituality, an environment in which good manners count alongside mathematics, and higher academic standards.”
Reviving the Hudson River School (Literally)
Jacob Collins has set up a summer program in New York’s Catskill Mountains to revive the art of 19th-century landscape painting by “modeling itself after the artistic, social and spiritual values of the Hudson River School painters.” But can 21st-century artists recapture the soul of America’s first great artistic movement without the 19th-century beliefs underlying that movement?
Finding Fact in the Iliad and Odyssey
Most scholars in recent decades had concluded that Homer’s epics were more or less fiction, with little, if any, basis in actual history. But a range of evidence – from ancient Hittite tables to modern studies of comparative anthropology – indicate that the works “contain a hidden key to ancient Greek history – though not necessarily the key that Homer’s readers once thought they were being given.”
It’s About Time Somebody Noticed
Half a dozen unsung heroes were honored this week in London: the translators who make the literature of other tongues accessible to English-speakers. “Translation is an extraordinarily isolating practice,” said one of the winners. “I call it a vocation because it’s so badly paid… I’ve probably only met half a dozen translators in my life. We work in small darkened rooms.”
Exploring ‘Experimental Philosophy’
The entire discipline of philosophy is being shaken up by a group of professors who “think that by studying human minds, using empirical techniques, and drawing on the insights of modern psychological science, they can get a better sense of where intuitions come from, and whether or when they should be granted credence.”
The Best Thing About Censorship —
— is that it doesn’t work. The author of the much-challenged book The Golden Compass says that “they never learn. The inevitable result of trying to ban something – book, film, play, pop song, whatever – is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone. Why don’t the censors realise this?”