“One of the greatest challenges for modern readers of the Hebrew Bible is to allow the text to mean what it says, when what is says flies in the face of doctrines that emerged centuries later from philosophical debates about the abstract category ‘God’.” (What’s more, it’s not actually a book; it’s more like a library.)
Author: Matthew Westphal
Is The God Of The Bible Perfect? Can He Be?
Yoram Hazony: “As far as I can tell, the biblical authors avoid asserting any such thing. And with good reason. … The belief that any human mind can grasp enough of God to begin recognizing perfections in him would have struck the biblical authors as a pagan conceit.”
Polish National Ballet Steps Into The Front Rank
“In the 19th century the company ranked high among European troupes … but Poland’s traumatic 20th-century wars and their consequences for the country have meant a low artistic profile on the dance front – and, for the most part, modest artistic ambitions. Yet how quickly things can change.”
How Dogme 95 Changed Denmark
The artistic manifesto championed by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg “wasn’t just a watershed for film, though. It was a watershed for all of Denmark, and one that would come to embody its cultural renaissance. … Dogme, I discovered, had even sparked a renaissance in Danish cooking.”
How The New Oscar Schedule Is Reshaping Campaigns
The early nomination date, Jan. 10, “may help with another perennial Oscar problem, the sense that few viewers at home have seen the top films. Most studios depend on a nomination ‘bounce’ to help their roll-out to theaters, so art houses and indie cinemas, and even multiplexes, across the country may have a plethora of options earlier than usual.”
David Foster Wallace, Bard Of Clinical Depression
“Depression was part of Wallace’s psyche, and so it was part of his job to describe it. He knew that profound isolation is one of its chief tortures. He also saw how natural it was for observers to find the depressive unbearably self-obsessed. Perhaps that’s why Wallace worked so hard to make communicable the inchoate fragments he managed to pull out of himself while he was suffering.”
Three Writers Sitting Around Talking About David Foster Wallace
Eric Been, Maria Bustillos and Michael Goetzman discuss such propositions as “[He] was his most consequentially gracious when his tenderness and generosity were only barely outpacing his capacity to be a total dickhead.”
Moscow’s Maly Theater Is Slipping Into A Sinkhole (Blame The Bolshoi)
“The grandiose reconstruction of the Bolshoi Theater has negatively affected its neighbor, the Maly Theater, causing the building to sink faster into the earth … Both theaters, built on the city’s Teatralnaya Ploshchad, had the same problem connected with ground waters flowing through the area.”
BBC’s New Director-General Will Be Royal Opera House Chief Tony Hall
“Royal Opera House chief executive Tony Hall has been appointed as director general of the BBC, just a week-and-a-half after the hapless George Entwistle resigned from the job – in a secret, emergency process aimed at restoring stability to the crisis-hit broadcaster.”
NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman Announces Retirement
“My intention has always been to serve one term … The time has come for me to become a cliché: I turned 65, am going to retire, and cannot wait to spend more time in Miami Beach.”