Rowling and a religious controversy
The most boring book in the world has sparked a religious controversy. Sikh leaders in India have spoken out against passages in J.K. Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy in which a… 2 / Read more »
Not Beloved in the Heartland
In December, Plymouth-Canton Community Schools (Plymouth, Michigan) Superintendent Jeremy M. Hughes removed Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, Beloved and Graham Swift’s Booker-shortlisted Waterland from the high-school curriculum after a complaint from… 1 / Read more »
Tear Gas and Petrol Bombs: Protests In Literature
Richard Wright once said, “All literature is protest,” but James Baldwin’s retort was that “All literature might be protest but all protest was not literature.” Scores of Greeks have been… 6 / Read more »
A Mount Holyoke College physics professor, Mark Peterson, argues that Galileo Galilei’s love of poetry and artistic impulses played a critical role in his revolutionary re-imagination of the cosmos. At… Read more »
New York magazine this week profiles Martin Peretz, who stepped down as editor of The New Republic, which he has edited and co-owned since 1974, on January 1st. Peretz has… Read more »
Writing at The New York Times philosophy blog, The Stone, Harvard philosophy professor Sean D. Kelly has written an essay about how to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of religious delusion and… 2 / Read more »
Is it wrong to use the word pornography to help describe the newly renovated Vatican Apostolic Library? Maybe. But that’s the only word I have for these images of it.… Read more »
“One of the most intriguing traditions in western art,” that of painting pregnant Madonnas, a tradition that was “almost entirely confined to Tuscany in the 130 years ending around 1467,”… Read more »
“A column penned by the doyenne of right-wing rhetoric Ann Coulter has come under fire for alleged plagiarism,” according to a report on Raw Story.com by John Byrne. He says… Read more »
Sixteen years after Islamic fundamentalists declared a fatwah on Salman Rushdie that drove him into hiding, the author of Satanic Verses is “ambling the cobbled streets in plain sight” as… Read more »