Tag: paradox
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Milbank, Orthodoxy, Politics
Anglican theologian John Milbank has been defying expectations for a long time. His ideas, which have driven a movement called Radical Orthodoxy, refuse to be either liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary. They’re always challenging. In a classic Killing the Buddha essay about him, Jeff Sharlet wrote, with sensible hyperbole, that Radical Orthodoxy “may be…
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Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Last night, Dr. Atomic closed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and I saw it from standing room. I have already written about a slow opera with big hopes, Philip Glass’s Satyagraha—this is another. What is it about these new operas, which have to turn every historical event into a funeral march? In John Adams’s presentation…
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Fame, Sainthood, Personhood, Failure
I’ll begin with a commentary on a commentary on a commentator of texts. Last night over noodles in a food court in Flushing, Queens, a friend told me about an Egyptian poet who probed the connections between commentary and silence. In the September 29 New Yorker, Louis Menand has a piece on the literary critic…
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Were Things Really Better Then?
Passing by a front porch sale in my neighborhood this afternoon, I turned around my bike, stopped, and picked up (for a quarter) a little book called The One Hundred and One Best Songs. It is a songbook from 1922 published by The Cable Company of Chicago, “makers of the famous Cable line of pianos…
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The Theory of Double Truth
Have you ever had the desire, the urge, the dangerous little need to contradict yourself for its own sake? Or for the sake of something quite unspeakable? The words “paradox” and “contradiction” come eerily close to being synonyms—they mean the same encounter of irreconcilables—yet they connote different moods. A contradiction is the dumbest, most obvious…