“The city of Athens prudently kept on hand a number of unfortunate souls, whom it maintained at public expense, for appointed times as well as in certain emergencies . . . The rite is therefore a repetition of the original, spontaneous ‘lynching’ that restored order in the community by reestablishing, around the figure of the …
Give It A Rest
Editor, I have a proposal for your newspaper, and for Mr. Ralph Nielsen. In his most recent screed, Ralph said that he declined a public debate with me because he is not a trained speaker, and he prefers the written word. Good enough. This, therefore, is my proposal. The Argonaut should publish 500 words from …
Should Sinners Die?
Editor, I would like to make one small, but important, correction to the story you ran on the protest at the recent “Hate is not a family value” dance. I was quoted as saying that homosexuality is a sin, and that those who sin deserve to die. This is quite true, but a missing point, …
A Substitute Aristocracy in a Democracy
“American popular culture is as old as the colonies, but the appearance of high and popular culture as distinctive categories in American life occurred around the turn of this century [1900] . . . a cultural hierarchy emerged that divided American life into ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as a primary means of social, intellectual and …
Fear of Radical Contagion
“Men cannot confront the naked truth of their own violence without the risk of abandoning themselves to it entirely. They have never had a clear idea of this violence, and it is possible that the survival of all human societies of the past was dependent on this fundamental lack of understanding” (Girard, Violence and the …
Puddles
“Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we are brow-beaten into ‘appreciating,’ are not good work because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his …
From Cain and Abel Down
“It is not only in myths that brothers are simultaneously drawn together and driven apart by something they both ardently desire and which they will not or cannot share — a throne, a woman or, in more general terms, a paternal heritage” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 63).
Comments on Comments
This last week, after there was a comments pile-up here in the discussion of the Ligonier situation, a reasonable question was raised by David Bahnsen, which was, why have a comments feature at all? Ironically, my wife and I had just been talking about the same thing, and then after the question was raised here, …
Artistic Responsibility?
“In the highest aesthetic circles one now hears nothing about the artist’s duty to us. It is all about our duty to him. He owes us nothing: we owe him ‘recognition,’ even though he has never paid the slightest attention to our tastes, interests, or habits. If we don’t give it to him, our name …
A Brother Thing
“We instinctively tend to regard the fraternal relationship as an affectionate one; yet the mythological, historical, and literary examples that spring to mind tell a different story: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Eteocles and Plyneices, Romulus and Remus, Richard the Lionhearted and John Lackland. The proliferation of enemy brothers in Greek myth and in …