[gallery] A Sea of Glistening Solar Panels Photographed at the Nevada SolarReserve by Reuben Wu (via Adam Roberts on Twitter)
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US Edition!
I’m delighted to report that Golden Hill will be published in hardcover in the United States by Scribner. Dates are not yet decided, but the American edition should appear some time in 2017.A book about the pre-history of New York couldn’t hope to have a more venerable New York publisher, but the connection turns out to be even more satisfyingly specific. The firm was founded by Charles Scribner I in 1846, a mere century after Mr Smith’s time. And where? In a room leased from the Brick Church Chapel at 145 Nassau Street. About three hundred yards, in other words, from where I put Tabitha Lovell’s front door on Golden Hill; about fifty yards from the site of the Pope Day bonfire on the Common.
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(via Bookmarking Book Art — Leilei Guo | Books On Books)
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plansofarchitecture: Alberto Burri, Grande Cretto, 1984-2015, Gibellina, Sicily
To the extent that we look on our wounded division and blame only other parties, seeing no good in them and no fault in us, we have not yet come to that fullness of love, repentance, and unity in truth that characterizes the Christian life. “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in darkness” (1 John 2:9).If the Roman Catholic Church, so many years after the Reformation, could claim its own share in Christian division, how can Anglicans not do the same?
12 Romans walk into a bar...
I’ve been thinking a good bit lately about this passage from Julian Baggini’s review of Martha Nussbaum’s new book:
Unconditional forgiveness, in which repentance is not required, is not much better. It too sometimes “channels the wish for payback,” following revenge’s road of status by elevating the pardoner to the moral high ground. It is perhaps telling that Christianity often “juxtaposes an ethic of forgiveness with an ethic of spectacular retribution.” Nussbaum points to a fascinating passage in Paul’s “Twelfth Letter to the Romans” which makes this link explicit. Paul advises against revenge, not because it is wrong, but because we should “leave it to the wrath of God.” You should treat your enemy kindly, not to reward him, but to compound his punishment. “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”
Bold text my own. I checked Nussbaum’s text, and I think I see what happened. On page 77, Nussbaum introduces the relevant chapter by writing, “In Romans 12….” My suspicion is that Baggini had seen references to, for example, “2 Corinthians” or “1 Kings,” and knew that those numbers indicated separate “books,” and so assumed that Nussbaum was doing the same thing, with the number in a different place. Perhaps he assumed that Brits put the number at the beginning (12 Romans) and Americans at the end (Romans 12).
To be sure, the error might not be Baggini’s: he could have written “Romans 12” and had it changed by a copyeditor, and didn’t notice. Or noticed but thought the editor knew something he didn’t. Whose error it is doesn’t matter to me — though it’s interesting that nobody at the Prospect caught this — so much as the kind of error it is. It catches my attention because it’s the error of a person who isn’t afflicted by the kind of biblical illiteracy that people often comment on (failing to catch a biblical allusion in one of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches) but something deeper: an ignorance of even the basic shape of the Bible.
If you think that Paul wrote at least twelve letters to the Romans, how many letters do you think he wrote overall? How many books do you think are in the New Testament, assuming you know that the Christian Bible has two testaments? More generally, when you think about the Bible, what images and ideas present themselves to you?
Please understand, in asking these questions I am not in any way playing a gotcha game or reveling in the ignorance of wicked infidels. I am genuinely and deeply curious, in an anthropological kind of way, about how the Bible is imagined by people who just don’t have any clear idea what’s in it.
dissidents, not intellectuals
These and other trends have made me sensible of how different our circumstances are from those in which Neuhaus learned to speak as both a Christian and an intellectual, circumstances that were still to some degree in force when First Things was founded in 1990. As Christians, we have a place to stand—in the Church. But in this cultural moment our churches are anxious, ambivalent, and unsure (unlike mainline Protestantism in its heyday). Which means that as intellectuals, we have no solid ground.Neuhaus always thought of himself as speaking from the center of what he liked to call the “American experiment.” I’m certainly patriotic, but I see myself speaking from the periphery. We are dissidents, not “intellectuals.”
— Speaking from the Peripheries | R. R. Reno | First Things. The distinction between intellectual and dissident strikes me as a very important one. So maybe the key question is not “How might Christian intellectuals become truly ‘public’ once again?” but rather “How might intelligent Christians faithfully and effectively play their role as dissidents — as something like the not-wholly-loyal opposition to the current power-knowledge regime?”