“Caiaphas was invoking a mechanism for preserving culture that is as old as culture itself. Whether it is the Assyro-Babylonian myth declaring that Marduk created the world by killing the monster Tiamat; or the Teutonic myth telling how Odin formed the world by raising the corpse of Ymir from the sea of Ymir’s own blood; …
And Where Would We Be Without Music Videos?
“The ‘Fab Four’ first captured the serious attention of critics and intellectuals with their cinematic debut in A Hard Day’s Night (1964), considered a precursor of today’s music videos” (William Romanowski, Pop Culture Wars, p. 218).
Sacrifice As Inoculation
“The physician inoculates the patient with a minute amount of the disease, just as, in the course of the rites, the community is injected with a minute amount of violence, enabling it to ward off an attack of full-fledged violence” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 289).
Black and Tan
“Rock was a derivative of two other popular music traditions in the rural South that existed alongside the Anglo-American one: the country or ‘hillbilly’ music of rural southern whites (country blues and gospel, honky-tonk and bluegrass) and the African-American tradition (blues, rhythm and blues, jazz and gospel music).” (William Romanowski, Pop Culture Wars, p. 209).
The Heart of the Scandal
“The more frenzied the mimetic process becomes, caught up in the confusion of constantly changing forms, the more unwilling men are to recognize that they have made an obstacle of the model and a model of the obstacle” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 189).
Not A Parody. I Repeat . . .
This is what you get when you allow women preachers. Or, rather, this is what you don’t get. Or something.
The Poetic Case Against Postmodernism
Human language is a gift of God. When God created Adam, He gave him many gifts. He gave the Garden, and all that it contained. He gave him the woman, bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. And God also gave Adam the gift of speech, which enabled him to talk about all …
A Fourth Decade of Psalms/Psalm 39
Introduction: This psalm, along with many other passages, teaches us how to understand the transience of our lives. “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). Some men ignore this truth. Some see it and despair. Others, blessed of God, see it and learn wisdom. The …
When the Seers Are Blind
“In a series of cases beginning in 1957, the Court judged that obscenity and the representation of sexuality were not the same thing and that ‘material dealing with sex in a manner that advocates ideas . . . or has literary or scientific or artistic value or any other forms of social importance may not …
Hidden In Plain Sight
“We have only to look at the numerous everyday displays of envy and jealousy to realize that even adults never attribute their mutual antagonisms to that simple phenomenon” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 176).