Permanent Liminality and Modernity
Permanent Liminality and Modernity: Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels. Arpad Szakolczai. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2017. As in the previous review, I’ll just select some of the novelists studied in Permanent Liminality and Modernity: Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels (hereafter PL), hoping thereby to convey…
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Svetlana Alexievich, tr. Bela Shayevich. New York: Random House, 2016. One of Dostoevsky’s more profound and even prophetic philosophical questions is posed by Ivan, the intellectual, to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring monk, in The Brothers Karamazov: Would he find…
Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine: Three Approaches (Part II)
La Tentation from a Girardian perspective. Flaubert in La Tentation has confronted the epoch, summed up in Anthony’s spiritual tribulation, in which archaic sacredness, passing through the urbanity of Hellenistic culture and mixing itself with the charisma of the Roman Empire, must acknowledge the new dispensation that accretes around…
Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine: Three Approaches (Part I)
Introduction: A Nameless Genre. Gustave Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine ou la révélation de l’âme (first version 1848; final version 1874), its sui generis character notwithstanding, belongs in a recognizable, yet largely unrecognized, genre of mid- and late-Nineteenth Century literature that includes, among other items, Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1850), Henrik…
“Glory is My Work: Mary Oliver’s Search for Order” (Part II)
In Oliver’s longest poem, The Leaf and the Cloud, questioning about the meaning of beauty unfolds into an inquiry into the meaning of life and death. The poet expresses her passionate love of beauty by asking what it is about beauty that stimulates the intensity in her soul that…
“Glory is My Work: Mary Oliver’s Search for Order” (Part I)
Eric Voegelin developed a rich body of concepts for interpreting literary symbols. This essay will use those concepts to interpret some of the verse of the contemporary American poet Mary Oliver. “The poem most popular today is the fairly brief lyric poem” (APH 84). Oliver’s oeuvre consists almost exclusively…
Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary
Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary. Arpad Szakolczai. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016. Arpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology at University College Cork, and the first book’s subtitle is The Sociology of the Contemporary (hereafter NS) while the second occurs within a Contemporary Liminality Series. Still, all…
33rd International Meeting of THE ERIC VOEGELIN SOCIETY, San Francisco 2017
33rd International Meeting of THE ERIC VOEGELIN SOCIETY, 2017 American Political Science Association Meeting,August 31-September 3 San Francisco, CA David Walsh, Meeting Director [email protected] Dear Friends, This is our program as it currently stands. Please continue to update me with any changes that become necessary. At this…
As in the previous review, I’ll just select some of the novelists studied in Permanent Liminality and Modernity: Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels (hereafter PL), hoping thereby to convey at least an important thread underlying his investigation—this reviewer has to confess…
One of Dostoevsky’s more profound and even prophetic philosophical questions is posed by Ivan, the intellectual, to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring monk, in The Brothers Karamazov: Would he find the torture of one child acceptable if it was somehow the necessary means…
Flaubert in La Tentation has confronted the epoch, summed up in Anthony’s spiritual tribulation, in which archaic sacredness, passing through the urbanity of Hellenistic culture and mixing itself with the charisma of the Roman Empire, must acknowledge the new dispensation that accretes around the Passion of Christ and takes the form of a unique non-sacrificial…
Gustave Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine ou la révélation de l’âme (first version 1848; final version 1874), its sui generis character notwithstanding, belongs in a recognizable, yet largely unrecognized, genre of mid- and late-Nineteenth Century literature that includes, among other items, Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1850), Henrik Ibsen’s Kejser og Galileer (1871), Richard Wagner’s incomplete Jesus von Nazareth…
Arpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology at University College Cork, and the first book’s subtitle is The Sociology of the Contemporary (hereafter NS) while the second occurs within a Contemporary Liminality Series. Still, all of Szakolczai’s work seems to effortlessly go beyond what’s conventionally regarded as…
protects one’s sense of superiority and innocence. Doing the good sometimes requires an odd courage: accepting
the risk of getting the soul’s hands dirty. But how and how much to dirty one’s hands are difficult to discern.
Mel Gibson’s good but gory (and…
Permanent Liminality and Modernity 
The Life of the Scholar 
The Use of Force 
“A Cow Is Just a Cow”: George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States 
The Collected Works: The Drama of Humanity (Volume 33) 
Eric Voegelin as Master Teacher 
New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism 
What is a Miracle? 
What Enlightenment, Exactly? 
God is Not Just the Good, as Plato Claimed But Love 
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets 
Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine: Three Approaches (Part II) 
“Glory is My Work: Mary Oliver’s Search for Order” (Part II) 
Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary 
So-So City 
Love Story 
Manchester By the Sea: Dark, Beautiful, and Real 
The Original Port Huron Statement: The Big Lebowski and the Religion of Laughter