“At their most radical and pessimistic, all great playwrights, including Moliere and Racine, have more affinity for the enemies of the theater than for its pious friends. Their implacable genius rejects the self-serving platitudes of cultural idolatry. Great theater has never flourished except in periods when it was distrusted and ostracized” (Girard, A Theater of …
Where You Been?
Ed Iverson is one of NSA’s faculty members and serves as the librarian of our Tyndale Library. In addition to these duties, as well as being a gracious Christian gentleman, he also writes a periodic column for the Moscow/Pullman Daily News. But the ongoing reaction to his column by our local lefties resembles a series …
Yay. More Troops.
I just finished looking over the premier issue of Salvo, and I commend it to you. A quarterly dedicated to a thoughtful engagement with the cultural follies that surround us on every side, this magazine is a welcome battalion of reinforcements in the culture wars. Check it out.
Allah and YHWH
One of my Greyfriars students has written helpfully to me, pointing out yet another implication of the Federal Vision trajectory, to wit, my agreement with Pope Benedict on the fact that YHWH and Allah cannot both be the one true God. He said this because this last Wednesday evening I did a presentation for Collegiate …
Sensate Hatred of Nobility
“The ripened sensate mentality of today, seeing human beings as no more than physical objects moved by instincts, reflexes, and drives, virtually disallows any attempt to raise them above the animal level. Genuine heroes are all by banned from literature and all but impossible for authors to create.” (B.G. Brander, Staring Into Chaos, pp. 300-301).
But What If Metaphor Is Ultimate Truth?
“But, at the same time, no one should nervously imagine that this critique of the Enlightenment proceeds from any relativistic postmodern nonsense. The modernist and postmodernist share this one thing in common: They both hold, at bottom, that metaphor is meaningless. The modernist goes off to find meaning somewhere else, suitably formulaic, and the postmodernist …
Redoubling Failed Efforts
“Instead of closing shop as a result of all its failures, desire, urged on by truth, plunges deeper into the abyss; at every turn in the road, it must transform the last dreadful mess that it has made into a new model and a new point of departure, a still shakier platform for the launching …
Special Effects, Dry Ice, and Lasers
“Instruments continued growing in size and complexity. Everything else about music grew as well, as colossalism transformed the art. Some theaters seated up to forty thousand people. In one play a thousand mules pranced about the stage. Concerts featured a hundred blaring trumpets, accompanying thousands of actors and acrobats. ‘Not being able to make it …
Metamorphing
“In our entertainment-crazed times, we have to take care not to use stories that have been transformed into something else. I call the process ‘metaphor-morphing,’ or ‘metamorphing’ for short. In this process the basic metaphors of story built into the world by God are reversed. For example, the serpent in the Garden was a dragon, …
Hungry For Praise
“Adulation is one of those things that are impossible to come by if we have to beg for them” (Girard, A Theater of Envy, p. 148).