Tag
Religion
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Can Centuries-Old Nuns Really Save Us from Ourselves?
“Can looking to women beholden to God help us escape a society so fixated on itself? Or does it simply package those devout lives as the latest content for a culture industry desperate for the next trending topic?”
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“Is Kahane Becoming Normalized?”: Shaul Magid on Meir Kahane’s Zionist Radicalism
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“I use the story to do the thinking”: Ann Leckie on Writing “Radiant Star”
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Beyond the “Burden of Belief”: Pádraig Ó Tuama on Religious Trauma, Eros, and Poetry as Prayer
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Violent Majorities Part I: Indian and Israeli Ethno-Nationalism
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Soft Atheism
It’s not easy being new. It doesn’t last long. Sometimes it isn’t even an apt characterization in the first place. Take “New Atheism,” the label applied to a body of writings by such figures as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. New Atheism is typically understood to have emerged in the first years of…
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Falling Faintly: McEwan’s Latest
In 1893, the Scottish writer William Sharp began publishing poetry under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod. MacLeod’s poems caught the eye of W. B. Yeats, who admired her lyricism even as he disdained the verse Sharp published under his own name. The elements of this minor literary intrigue—modern poetry and sexual confusion—lie behind Ian McEwan’s equally…
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Summer in Snow Country: A Sound and Photo Essay
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Less than two hours from Tokyo Station by bullet train, the village of Osaki is nonetheless a country backwater. The town lies aside narrow Route 291, which snakes and tunnels its way to Yuzawa, the onsen (hot spring)…
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The Road to the Holy Mountain
Twenty years ago, I stumbled upon one of the most unusual places on earth. A young student of logic, I was attending a workshop in Thessaloniki with extra time to spare, and the teacher suggested that I go to Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain. He would organize a pilgrim’s pass since the peninsula was an…
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Lie Down in the Karoo: An Antidote to the Anthropocene
Simón and David, a man and a boy, arrive by boat to find a new life. David’s father perished in an accident during the trip. David had a letter giving specifics of his mother. This was also lost. It is, then, an undocumented migrant child accompanied by an unrelated adult who arrives at the inn,…
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Abney Park Cemetery
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Salvation Army officers don’t die; they are “promoted to glory.” In Abney Park Cemetery there have been many such promotions, as most of the founding generation of the Salvos, including William Booth and his family, are buried here. Abney Park,…
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Mysteries
In medieval England, craft guilds—nailmakers, woolworkers, saddlers, grocers—designed scenes from Biblical history, beginning with Genesis, coursing through the life of Christ, and ending with Judgment Day. Guild members performed these so-called “mystery” plays annually on the feast day of Corpus Christi. Each scene was performed over and over again throughout the day, on a wagon…
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Fly on the Wall
What is it like to be a fly? What is it like to be a Jew? Despite its trans-species premise—an 18th-century French Jew is reincarnated as a fly in 21st-century Long Island—Jacob’s Folly, the new novel from author and filmmaker Rebecca Miller, is far more interested in answering the latter question than the former. Yes,…
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When the Diaspora Is Enuf
Quiet as it’s kept, some of us colored-girl creative-writer types kept our cool circa 2006 when that gelato-dripping, Gita-flipping, Bali-bossa-nova-ing best seller Eat, Pray, Love went multi-multiplatinum. We did not hate, because we knew the truth: we too binge, chant, and passionately blur the pages of our passports with so many stamps from Senegal, Salvador,…
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Memoir 2.0; or, Confession Gone Wild
Wild is Cheryl Strayed’s first confessional memoir—unless, of course, you count her name. As Strayed recalls about a third of the way through Wild, she authored that briefest of autobiographies on a set of no-fault divorce papers in 1994. Obsessed by the blank line where she was to write her new name, she toyed with…
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Jinn in the Machine
G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen is an unusual, exciting work of urban fantasy that broadens the usual meanings of “urban” and “fantasy.” What does it mean, the novel asks, for a person to turn to or away from faith? What kind of magic is needed to allow disenchanted, half-secularized young citizens of the Arab…
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Doin’ the Stuff: Reason , Belief, Modernity
A few years ago, during fieldwork I was conducting on an evangelically minded Christian charity in England, one of the managers told me about a peculiar issue the charity sometimes faced when it came to hiring new staff: job applicants felt emboldened to enlist the Heavenly Father as a reference. “God told me I was…
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Islamic Desire
An Arab Melancholia seems tailor-made for the contemporary cultural wars between liberal humanists and Islamic fundamentalists. “Abdellah Taïa,” the book’s blurb declares, “is the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco”—not only a Moroccan gay writer but the first one to write autobiographically about his own gay life and to be published in Morocco…
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Virtual Roundtable on Amy Waldman’sThe Submission
Last fall Public Books sponsored a lively roundtable discussion of Amy Waldman’s widely praised novel The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), which considers what might have happened if the winner of an anonymous architectural design competition for a Ground Zero memorial had been an American Muslim. The novel poses questions about our obligations as…
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The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot”
In The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides asks what would happen if nineteenth-century literature married twentieth-century theory, and the result is many brilliant novels in one: a romance, a coming-of-age story, a travelogue, an account of madness, and a tale of religious quest. Its protagonists are Brown University students, Class of 1982, which also makes The…
