The mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue reminds us that we need the voices of the dark past to help us understand the choices we now face.
History
Posted inArts & Culture, Ideas
The road from T. E. Lawrence’s Damascus to Syria’s civil war
Lawrence’s triumphant arrival in Damascus in 1918 might be said to have been the spark that ultimately ignited a powder keg of factional rivalries and distrust.
Posted inFaith, The Good Word
100 years after the Great War, what can we say to an exhausted world?
The whole world may not be at war, but sometimes our personal worlds do collapse.
Posted inFeatures, Politics & Society
With Anti-Semitism on the rise, can Poland come to terms with its past?
For almost 20 years Polish scholars have been at the cutting edge of Holocaust research. But a law proposed this year threatened to change all that.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: New Orleans at 300
After 300 years, New Orleans remains one of our most unique—and troubled—cities.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Elizabeth Ann Seton’s saintly journey
Elizabeth Seton—who overcame innumerable obstacles to pursue her vocation—was the first native-born citizen of the United States to be named a saint.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The Class of 1943: Simone Weil, Jacques Maritain, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot
Alan Jacobs’s new book is a collage of the intellectual considerations of five thinkers who, in their experience of the violence of World War II and their revulsion at the fascism that fueled it, contemplate the nature of education and its renewal after the anticipated Allied victory.
Posted inExplainer, Faith
The root of the China-Vatican agreement: Napoleon
Napoleon’s consolidation of power in France in 1801 involved the recognition of the pope as the “ordinary and immediate pastor” of the universal church—a key component in the impending agreement between the Vatican and China.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Idols, icons, images, illusions: Reviewing Mary Beard’s ‘How Do We Look’
Mary Beard’s new book is about the viewer as well as the viewed. It prompts us to think about how we construct our sense of civilization and the troubling ways that artistic depictions of the human and the divine serve to cement bias and, sometimes, provoke violence.
Posted inArt, Arts & Culture
New exhibit highlights the forgotten history of the Chicano resistance
On the 50th anniversary of many historic moments of the Chicano movement, a new photography exhibit at The Autry in Los Angeles is telling the Chicano story through the eyes of its participants.