More a Sign of Desperation Than Mastery and Control

“In the blink of a tease you are enticed to stay tuned with promises of exclusive stories and tape, good-looking anchors, helicopters, team coverage, hidden cameras, uniform blazers, and even, yes, better journalism. It is all designed to stop you from using the remote-control button to switch channels. But the teasing doesn’t stop there. During …

Far More, Actually

“The whole modern dogma of the absolute separation between great poetry and intelligence is one of the consequences of our blindness to the role of mimetic desire and victimage in great literature. The ultimate implications of Julius Caesar seem almost too dangerous to pursue. Our own rationality cannot teach the founding role of mimetic victimage …

The Meal Is Before You

We are God’s covenant people, and we are seated with our Lord in this covenant meal. Now covenants are, at bottom, relationships. Covenants are not doctrinal abstractions. Covenant is not a mere word that we use to distinguish ourselves from other denominational traditions. Covenants are structured in the very way that God created the world, …

Worship In the Temple of High Brow

“Until quite modern times—I think, until the time of the Romantics—nobody ever suggested that literature and the arts were an end in themselves. They ‘belonged to the ornamental part of life’, they provided ‘innocent diversion’; or else they ‘refined our manners’ or ‘incited us to virtue’ or glorified the gods. The great music had been …