The general Ptolemy
founded the Greco-Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty
that ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years after Alexander
the Great’s death. The Ptolemies tried to gain
the support of Egyptian priests in order to be recognised as legitimate
pharaohs. They renovated temples and also built magnificent new ones.
These royal portraits illustrate
the determination of the Ptolemaic rulers to
present themselves to their Egyptian subjects as legitimate successors to the
native pharaohs.
This
skilfully executed head shows a Ptolemaic king depicted entirely in accordance
with ancient Egyptian traditions. His head
is adorned by the rearing cobra (uraeus) protruding from the traditional
headcloth of Egyptian pharaohs (nemes).
This
royal head originally belonged to the statue of a sphinx, a type of Egyptian
sculpture usually seen flanking processional routes into temples. It is another example of the Ptolemies’ determination to
draw from Egyptian art and iconography, making them seem less like outsiders.
Find out more about the deep connections
between the ancient civilisations of Greece and Egypt in the BP exhibition Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds (19 May – 27 November 2016).
Trump announced that he considered saying something ‘very rough’ about Hillary Clinton or her family but in the end elected not to. He said this with solemnity, as if amazed at his own benevolence.
It’s odd to me that so many people other than Freddie have an opinion about whether he should have taken his new job, but for what it’s worth, I think it’s a job worth doing and that Freddie will do it well. For good or ill, assessment is now a basic and non-negotiable element of academic life, and Freddie has a very strong understanding of how it can be done responsibly, accurately, and in the interests of students and teachers alike. I wish him every success.
This thing of ours.
You ever look at the world, like,
really look at it?
It’s a great dome, some real
supernatural architecture, roof so smooth
and high
you can’t even touch it in a jet, not even
those invisible ones the Air Force fly
made of black ceramic
or some shit like that, going faster than music
faster than light can catch up with
not even then. And the air is thin up there,
so, and, that’s why I keep coughing, capisce?
Cold like frost lining the inside of the lungs.
And from so high, looking down
the sea is texture like an untuned TV channel
bright and gray and white and impossibly far deep.
This bambino, though:
he’ll step over this whole vault, like
stepping over the corpse of a rival,
bleeding on the sidewalk, and you got somewhere you need to be.
This whole dome and everything inside it
will kiss his ass
and sing his fucken praises. Believe me.
My correspondent felt that my argument betrayed a failure to understand his generation. ‘I’m a regular social media and in-class arguer against people who are being racist, queer-phobic, etc,’ O’Donnell wrote. 'I like explaining why it’s bad and trying to change their minds. But it’s exhausting. Sometimes I want to go home and not have to deal with that. When asking for a home, they’re not asking that their every whim be catered to, but that they have one place they don’t have to constantly be on guard. One where they can take a break from the exhausting work of speaking out for what you believe in. Obviously, Yale students and others have overreached, but you should acknowledge the genuine concerns behind what these students are saying.’
A College Is a Community But Cannot Be a Home - The Atlantic. I have just one question for O'Donnell, and it involves those “people who are being racist, queer-phobic, etc” in his classes. Where are they supposed to go at the end of the day, when he doesn’t want to deal with them any more?
”The Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero’s 1927 monograph Depero Futurista, also known as The Bolted Book, because it is famously bound by two industrial aluminum bolts, is acknowledged as the first modern-day artist’s book. Filled with typographic experimentation and serving as a showcase for Depero’s art in a variety of media, it is universally recognized as a tour de force of avant-garde book-making.
Designers & Books, in collaboration with the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, and the Mart, Museum of modern and contemporary art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy (which houses Depero’s archives), will launch a Kickstarter on October 18 to publish a new facsimile edition of this rare and groundbreaking book.” [source] [pdf press release]
My friend Wesley Hill recently posted a wonderfully concise and elegant outline of what we might call first steps in theological anthropology. I’m wondering if for those of us living in the Anthropocene — so obsessed with everything we humans do and are, for ill and for good — theological anthropology might have to be first theology, the place from which we need to begin, for rhetorical if not principial reasons. Something like that seems to be the driving impulse behind Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality, and the Self, a first volume of a systematic theology that is an “essay on the Trinity” but that begins by trying to situate and make sense of human sexual desire.
There are dangers in this way of going about things. (Theology is always dangerous, of course.) A theology that begins with us may never really achieve escape velocity, may remain within the gravitational pull of the merely human. Certainly that’s a risk. So then we might turn to the also ongoing systematic theology of Katherine Sonderegger, who begins with the doctrine of God — with particular emphasis on the oneness of God, before getting to Trinitarian considerations.
One way to be theologically coherent and sensible at this moment is to cultivate this binocular vision: for example, to read Coakley, but read her towards Sonderegger; to read Sonderegger, but read her towards Coakley. A doubled reading, starting perhaps necessarily with our human self-understanding, but then moving quickly to occupy the other pole of theological awareness, with the God who is One, not even, yet, the God of Israel, but the God who constitutes and manifests Being, Consciousness, Bliss. And then we read and think and pray our way towards the convergence of the paths, which is Jesus Christ. To read in this doubled way is one aspect of the imitation of Christ. After all, in Augustine’s words, “As God he is our goal; as man he is our way.”
