“Though its abuse could lead them from Him, its proper religious use was a ‘plain man’s pathway to heaven.’ It offered the plain poet a world rich in intrinsic symbols, correspondences, and significances that were not decorations but necessary parts of the truth he attempted to tell” (Daly, p. 71).
And Power Corrupts
“These new models tend to be adopted without the demands for rigorous evidence required by traditional scholarship. If Euro-centrism is a fault, one would think Afro-centrism would be similarly narrow-minded. If patriarchy is wrong, why would matriarchy be any better? But these quibbles miss the point of postmodern scholarship. Truth is not the issue. The …
Barbaric Lyricism
“Those who create the sacred with their own violence are incapable of seeing its truth. This is what makes the friends totally deaf to the appeals Job is constantly making. The more they participate in violence against the unfortunate man, the more they are carried away by their own barbaric lyricism and the less they …
Choosing Your Own Designer History, One That Works for You
“Since there is no objective truth, history may be rewritten according to the needs of a particular group. If history is nothing more than ‘a network of agonistic [i.e., fighting, contending] language games,’ then any alternative ‘language game’ that advances a particular agenda, that meets ‘success’ in countering institutional power, can pass as legitimate history. …
Sacralizing the Violence
“Under our very eyes, the three friends sacralize the violence. The insults and meanness are metamorphosed into the grandiose accomplishments of a supernatural mission . . . Whenever opinion turns against a leader formerly elevated by the people’s favor, the community automatically attributes the change to the intervention of an absolute Justice” (Girard, Job, p. …
Margarine of the Arts
“Based on his study of twenty-one world civilizations—ranging from ancient Rome to imperial China, from Babylon to the Aztecs—Toynbee found that societies in disintegration suffer a kind of ‘schism of the soul.’ They are seldom simply overrun by some other civilization. Rather, they commit a kind of cultural suicide. Disintegrating societies, he says, have several …
The Ancient Respectability of the Accuser
“Words, too, form a crowd; countless, they swirl about the head of the victim, gathering to deliver the coup de grace. The three series of speeches are like volleys of arrows aimed at the enemy of God. The accusations descend on Job like so many adversaries, intent upon the destruction of tyhe some friend. Their …
Grim Victory
“Women are beautiful, and men are necessary. It has been the great victory of the feminist movement to make women unlovely by persuading them that men are not needed” (Anthony Esolen, in Touchstone, December 2006, p. 5).
Postmodernism Much Larger Than Its Theorists
“Modernism, however, is being replaced by the new secular ideology of postmodernism. This new set of assumptions about reality—which goes far beyond mere relativism—is gaining dominance throughout the culture. The average person who believes that there are no absolutes may never have heard of the academic exercise of ‘deconstruction.’ The intellectual establishment may disdain the …
Barely Disguised
“Violence is the true ‘referent’; barely disguised in the threats of the friends and not disguised at all in Job’s laments. Although our two types of discourse seem so different, each deals, in its own way, with the same. They both refer to the process whereby a hero becomes a scapegoat; they both refer to …