By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, February 14, 2008 Thursday is book day at Telos. We use this time and space for posts about books, authors, and all sorts of writing, considered in light of the sorts of questions that are at home at Telos. As with all our blogs, you are invited to post a comment. If you have a book review that you’d like to post here, or some other comment on the worlds of writing, drop a line to us at telospress@aol.com.
J. Peter Pham has reviewed Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred, in the journal American Foreign Policy Interests. The review is available here (in PDF format).
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By Adrian Pabst · Monday, February 11, 2008 Among the many myths that govern academic and public debates about the meaning and future of Europe, none is more persistent than that of secularization. The story goes something like this. After the dark ages and the “wars of religion” in the seventeenth century, Europe embarked on a slow but steady trajectory away from religion and faith and toward science and reason. Aided by the Protestant Reformation, the Treaty of Westphalia established the principle of “cuius regio, eius religio,” thus enthroning the primacy of the state over the Church and politics over religion. As a result, clerical and political absolutism sanctified by Rome was abandoned in favor of popular revolutions and democratic principles. Gradually, hereditary empires and absolute monarchies gave way to constitutional rule and the self-determination of sovereign nations and their enlightened leaders. The Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1848 cemented the independence from God and the priesthood and drew the battle lines between the wave of progress and the forces of reaction that culminated in the French separation of state and church in 1905. The triumph of positivism and the advent of science and technology did much to discredit the anti-modernist stance of Roman Catholicism.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, February 7, 2008 Thursday is book day at Telos. We use this time and space for posts about books, authors, and all sorts of writing, considered in light of the sorts of questions that are at home at Telos. As with all our blogs, you are invited to post a comment. If you have a book review that you’d like to post here, or some other comment on the worlds of writing, drop a line to us at telospress@aol.com.
On January 26, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, delivered an address in the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool on “Europe, Faith and Culture.” It delivers a diagnosis of contemporary European culture not far from that in Benedict XVI’s famous Regensburg lecture. In both, the disappearance of faith leads to a cultural decline. Williams posits a parallel between a post-Christian Europe marked both by a flat post-modernism and a primitivist reduction of Islam into fundamentalism—these are parallel reifications.
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By Jeffrey Herf · Monday, February 4, 2008 On November 16, 2007, Jeffrey Herf delivered this talk in Frankfurt as part of the public lecture series “Römerberggespräche.” He argues that the postwar German mandate to “come to terms with its past” and face the legacy of the Holocaust has renewed relevance today facing the antisemitism of radical Islam.
In a key passage he writes:
” . . . today’s radical Islamists have much in common with their fascist and Nazi predecessors. The ideological attack on liberal democracy and cultural modernity, on full equality for women, on the priority of the freedom of the individual in the face of the pressures of collectivism, the vision of a totalitarian society and especially and most of all the murderous hatred of the Jews, all of this returns now enveloped in a religious discourse. As their fascist and Nazi predecessors once did, now the radical Islamist propagate paranoid conspiracy theories combined with fanatical anti-Semitism and the radical anti-Americanism that is bound up with it. With these ideological foundations, the Islamists, just as the Nazis of the 1940s, have legitimated the murder of defenseless civilians.”
The full text is here.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, January 31, 2008 Thursday is book day at Telos. We use this time and space for posts about books, authors, and all sorts of writing, considered in light of the sorts of questions that are at home at Telos. As with all our blogs, you are invited to post a comment. If you have a book review that you’d like to post here, or some other comment on the worlds of writing, drop a line to us at telospress@aol.com.
Daniel Fuchs, The Golden West: Hollywood Stories. Introduction by John Updike. Jaffrey, NH: Black Sparrow, 2005. Pp. xiv + 258. Daniel Fuchs, The Brooklyn Novels: Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt, Low Company. Introduction by Jonathan Lethen. Jaffrey, NH: Black Sparrow, 2006. Pp. xiv + 927.
During the mid-1930s, Fuchs (born in 1909) published his three accounts of tenement life in New York; they hold a significant, if not prominent place in the literary history of the Jewish-American novel and have been republished periodically. In the late thirties, Fuchs moved to Hollywood, part of the literary migration into the film industry (he worked once briefly with William Faulkner). He would continue to write fiction, now with a California focus, thematically comparable to West’s Day of the Locust, although in a very different register. Some of this writing would appear in the New Yorker, and several of his stories (and a short novel) are collected in The Golden West, along with some memoir-like documents. In Hollywood, however, his attention had shifted primarily to writing screenplays. While each of these Black Sparrow volumes therefore represents a noteworthy contribution to the historical documentation of two venues of writing, taken together they raise important issues about the transformation of culture in the United States of the mid-twentieth century, the interplay of culture and commerce, and—a central question for Critical Theory—the constitution of the culture industry as well as its standing as a magnet for derisive critique.
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By Zoltán Balázs · Monday, January 28, 2008 One of the most idiosyncratic features of human communities is the way they think of time, even though there has been little reflection on that in political theory. To mention just one example that indicates how different the collective experience of time may be, I allude to the South American Aymara people, who associate the past with the spatial front, and the future with the spatial back. That is, past is ahead of us, and future is behind us. In this framework progress in time makes perhaps less sense, since the very concept of progress is, at its root, advance in space, and we can hardly move back to the past. (In science fiction, time travel to the past is a problem just because we presuppose that in the past we would be as free to act as we are in the present, and shall be in the future—that is, we take our present back with us to the past!)
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