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[gallery] publicdomainreview:

Double-page spreads from Adriaen Coenen’s Visboek (Fish Book), an epic 800+ page tome on all things fish and fish-related. See more at: http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/adriaen-coenens-fish-book-1580/

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[gallery] Tim Bobbin’s Rap at the PYRATES

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[gallery]

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These covers for a Chinese edition of The Lord of the Rings, by Jian Guo, have been all over my Twitter feed, but I like them so much I’m going to post them anyway.

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[gallery] Possibly my favorite item in the British Museum is this miniature altarpiece, which, as you can see, opens to show an immensely detailed relief carving, in boxwood, of the Crucifixion. And when I say miniature: the entire object is less than ten inches high. When you see it in person, the spears of the Roman legionnaires are impossibly thin, the detail on the faces impossibly precise. The emotional power of the object is all out of proportion to its size.

Details here.

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[gallery] boyopress:

Fountain Room menu, circa 1933
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the short long term

Consider this a follow-up to this morning’s post on religious freedom. Someone — and not a stranger — recently said to me on Twitter, “I am concerned that you think only conservatives have religious rights.” A pretty damning accusation, if true. But it isn’t true. I’ll cite just one example in my defense. Four years ago I wrote in response to the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy:

But the really sad thing is that people who call themselves conservatives — Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin — should be crying out for apparatuses of the state to limit and police voluntary religious association. This is a profoundly anti-conservative view in two ways. First, it is historically myopic, as Mayor Bloomberg’s brief history of controversies about religious freedom in New York City demonstrates. It’s remarkable that people who invoke the Founders so regularly and in such tones of devotion could be utterly deaf to the Founders’ concern to ensure freedom for mistrusted minority religions. They might start by reading George Washington’s once-famous letter to the Newport synagogue, paying special attention to this sentence: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts.” In Washington’s understanding, it is misbegotten even to ask the question, “Should we tolerate this?”

Moreover, the Gingrich-Palin view of the matter is as blind to the future as it is to the past. No one would make such an argument who did not anticipate that his or her own religious preferences will forever be enshrined as the socially dominant ones. Having endorsed the principle that minority religions can be policed by the state, Gingrich and Palin may well be unpopular figures to their descendants, if Christianity continues to decline as a force in American culture.

In other words, when the religious freedom of Muslims was under threat, I made precisely the same arguments that I am making today, and described the view being taken by many who call themselves religious conservatives as “an infantile grasping after a fleeting and elusive cultural dominance.”

Again, that’s just one example. So why would someone accuse me of thinking that only conservatives have religious rights? Because at this particular moment, it’s religious traditionalists whose claims to liberty are at issue. And the person who made that accusation is thinking only in terms of this particular moment — which is exactly what the internet firehose of news (and “news”) always prompts us to do. So again: let’s try to think wider, and think longer. And if we can’t easily assume the perspective of the longue durée, we at least ought to be able to cast our minds back four freakin’ years.

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Public gatherings—and most private ones, as well—made him jumpy. For years he had passed up family weddings and graduations, town meetings, dedications and book awards, cocktail bashes and boat gams and garden parties. As his literary reputation widened when he was in his forties and fifties, he did make it to a few select universities to receive honorary degrees, but despite prearranged infusions of sherry or Scotch he found the ceremonials excruciating. “So the old emptiness and dizziness and vapors seized hold of me,” he writes to my mother after his honoris causa Ph.D. appearance at Dartmouth in 1948. “Nobody who has never had my peculiar kind of disability can understand the sheer hell of such moments, but there they are.” And when the time came for the encomiums and the enrobing, there in the sunshine at Hanover, he went on, his hood—“white, quite big, and shaped like a loose-fitting horse collar”—became entangled with the honoree in the next seat, Ben Ames Williams: Andy’s worst dreams come true. “When I got seated the thing was up over my face, as in falconry,” he continues. “A fully masked Doctor of Letters, a headless poet.” After that, he stayed home, even passing up an invitation in 1963 to go to Washington and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson; the deed was consummated instead by a stand-in, Maine’s Senator Edmund Muskie, in the office of the president of Colby College. Andy also skipped his wife’s private burial in the Brooklin Cemetery, in July, 1977. None of us in the family expected otherwise or held this against him. And when his own memorial came, eight years later, I took the chance to remark, “If Andy White could be with us today he would not be with us today.”
Roger Angell on his stepfather, E. B. White
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how to think about religious freedom

Despite my recent insistence that I would write only one post on religious liberty — I was so naïve in those days — I’d like to follow up on some recent tweets:

It’s well known that passionate Christian commitment drove the movement to abolish slavery first in the United Kingdom and then in America; it’s also well known that the Civil Rights movement was theological and spiritual through and through. And yet these points are too often forgotten when people associate religious freedom exclusively with what tends to get called the Religious Right here in America. That association is both local and temporary, and there is no reason to think that it will continue indefinitely. The farther we project from our own moment the harder it is to guess what political and social roles Christianity will play; and the farther we get from our own geographical territory the more peculiar (by our standards) the public role of Christianity tends to be.

What’s curious, and to me deeply saddening, is that neither the political Left or Right keeps these points in mind. I can scarcely blame liberals for linking Christianity with the Republican Party when so many conservative Christians do exactly the same thing. And yet if we’re going to think wisely and well about the value of religious freedom, it’s vital that we extend that thinking beyond our locality and our moment. Whatever conclusions you draw on these matters, please don’t rely solely on the evidence that the News puts before your eyes. Think wider; think longer.

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If I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self-contradictory, culminating in the twin depletions of moral and material reservoirs upon which it has relied even without replenishing them, then we face a choice. We can pursue more local forms of self-government by choice or suffer by default an oscillation between growing anarchy and likely martial imposition of order by an increasingly desperate state.

If my analysis is fundamentally accurate, liberalism’s endgame is unsustainable in every respect: It cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it continually provide endless material growth in a world of limits. We can either elect a future of self-limitation born of the practice and experience of self-governance in local communities, or we can back slowly but inexorably into a future in which extreme license invites extreme oppression.

Unsustainable Liberalism by Patrick J. Deneen