“The American monomyth is giving rise to new forms of confessional faith . . . we conclude . . . with the notion of ‘credotainment,’ confessional movements based upon entertainment products” (Lawrence and Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero, pp. 12-13).
An American Variation on the Myth
“Americans have not moved beyond mythical consciousness. Moreover the form of the classical monomyth, with its symbolic call for lifetime service to a community’s institutions, allows us to highlight its absence in the distinctive pattern of what we call here the American monomyth. Although there are significant variations, the following archetypical plot formula may be …
Some Protestantism as Arch-Romanism
“The holy community which Calvin sought to set up in Geneva represents in some ways a completer integration of Christianity with civilization than anything Europe had yet seen. It is true that there emerges within Calvinism, especially in its later Puritan developments, a more negative attitude toward the cultural amenities than had been present in …
The Cape and Beret Problem Again
“Before romanticism declared art the province of a talented, bohemian few, drawing and painting were both common scientific tools and signs of personal refinement” (Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, p. 170).
Reinventing Yourself
“I like that merges into I’m like that. Identity prevails” (Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, p. 101).
Bit By Bit
“Not all personalized expression looks good to other people, of course. Especially in the early days of desktop publishing, a lot of amateurs went in for the multifont ransom-note look. PowerPoint presentations are still often hard to read or cluttered with clichéd clip art, and the Web is full of ugly sites. But, on the …
About Time
“Although clever allusions still have their place, the breakdown of modernist ideology means that it’s no longer necessary to hide aesthetic pleasure behind postmodern irony and camp” (Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, p. 13).
The Reformers and Typology
“As everyone knows, the rallying cry of the Reformation was ‘the one sense of Scripture,’ the sole authority of the literal meaning . . . this precept by no means led to prosaic literalism. As we shall see in more detail later, the tirades against medieval allegorizing leveled by Luther, Tyndal, Calvin, Perkins, and many …
Rescuing Art from the Artists
“Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously” (Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, pp. 4-5).
Lots of Fun Stuff
“The dynamist verge cherishes these things too. It care about intensive progress. And it perceives what stasists miss — the spectacular creativity and cumulative knowledge embedded in the things we take for granted: in the making of movies, the fabrics and shapes of our clothes, the subtle combination of fine cuisine, the emotional impact of …