“Life in Year One” Paperback Release
Scott Korb on what life was like in first century Palestine. Life in Year One, now in paperback.
Search Results for: Scott Korb
He Takes Them Off
rom Jill Lepore, at The New York Times News Desk blog:
No one knows why Jared Lee Loughner did what he did. Maybe no one will ever know. No one can explain madmen with guns. There’s a corridor at the John F. Kennedy Library where the walls are painted black and where television monitors play, night and day, a single scene: Walter Cronkite announcing Kennedy’s death. He takes his glasses off; he looks at the clock; he puts his glasses back on. He takes them off. He says not a word. And then, he puts his glasses back on.
(via Scott Korb) Continue Reading →
The Past upon Its Throne
by Scott Korb
A look at Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History
In her recent book, The Whites of Their Eyes, Harvard historian and regular New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore takes a close look at the Tea Party and calls it fundamentalist. The Whites of Their Eyes is a book almost entirely set in greater Boston: at Tea Party gatherings in Green Dragon Tavern, where in 1765 the Sons of Liberty themselves began gathering; at the Old South Meeting House, at re-stagings, by children, of the debates that led to the Boston Tea Party; on the field where the Battle of Lexington and Concord was fought, where on the morning of the annual reenactment Lepore’s family (and “some other sleepy-headed colonials”) wage their own little “battle on the green.” (One thing to note about the book is how often the facts of Lepore’s own Cambridge life enter the story—in this case, the family’s annual failure to get out of bed early enough to make it to the actual reenactment; they’re there in time for the parade that follows.)
Tea Party fundamentalism—or what Lepore calls “historical fundamentalism”—is of a different kind than the religious fundamentalism The Revealer typically notes, though the two are not mutually exclusive, nor are either particularly wholesome. Continue Reading →
Going Straight for the I AM
By Scott Korb
On its face, Marilynne Robinson’s tightly packed new book Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self may appear to be just another salvo in the ongoing war between religion (books) and science (books). And by temperament, my own sympathies typically lie with those writers ostensibly in the religion camp—Karen Armstrong, say, or Chris Hedges, or recently, even Adam Gopnik—whose books and essays and lectures usually aim to suggest, on the one hand, a common theme of compassion running through religious teachings, and on the other, a complexity and inwardness to religious belief that science (books)—or, “parascience,” as Robinson puts it—ignores, or, at the very least, minimizes. As a case for religion, Absence of Mind dutifully fires its shots. Take for instance what Robinson says early on about Daniel Dennett, whose Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Robinson just happens “to have in hand” as she writes. (It could, after all, be any number of these parascientific books.)
Dennett sheers off the contemplative side of faith, its subjectivity, as if the collective expressions of religion and the inward experience of it were nonoverlapping magisteria, as if religion were only what could be observed using the methods of anthropology or of sociology, without reference to the deeply pensive solitudes that bring individuals into congregations to be nurtured by the thought and culture they find there.
This Fixed, Steady Twoness
by Scott Korb
Whether he intended it or not Philip Pullman has written, most recently, a religious story. And insofar as The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is a religious story, as the title suggests it is a Christian one. (Though, it’s true, as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has said, the Gospels—especially Mark’s—are better, even on Pullman’s own terms). In some ways, Pullman’s title, which alone suggests the book’s supposed scandal, says it all. Not Jesus Christ, or even Jesus the Christ, but Jesus AND Christ, twin brothers borne of Mary, who was, in yet another supposed scandal to Christians, seduced by a figure calling himself an “an angel,” who “in order not to frighten her … had assumed the appearance of a young man, just like the one of the young men who spoke to her by the well.”
So, enough about Philip Pullman.
By their nature, religious stories self-complicate. Take the Gospels, just for example, which all tell similar stories “according to” someone or another—Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, say, names that attached themselves to the early Christian communities who wrote and kept these Gospels in the wake of Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 C.E. Continue Reading →
Praying For Prayer’s SakeOn the National Day of Prayer
by Scott Korb
Listen to Scott, contributing editor to The Revealer, talk about the National Day of Prayer on BBC4’s “Sunday.”
As defenders of the National Day of Prayer will tell you, George Washington called for our first day of prayer in 1789: “That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war.” These same people will also point out that Abraham Lincoln proclaimed three such days during the Civil War, most famously on April 30, 1863, to mark what he called a necessary “Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer,” because “we have forgotten God.” Victories in Gettysburg and Vicksburg the following summer occasioned the 1864 proclamation; 1865’s National Day of Prayer was held June 1, in Lincoln’s memory. Continue Reading →
Praying For Prayer's SakeOn the National Day of Prayer
by Scott Korb
Listen to Scott, contributing editor to The Revealer, talk about the National Day of Prayer on BBC4’s “Sunday.”
As defenders of the National Day of Prayer will tell you, George Washington called for our first day of prayer in 1789: “That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war.” These same people will also point out that Abraham Lincoln proclaimed three such days during the Civil War, most famously on April 30, 1863, to mark what he called a necessary “Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer,” because “we have forgotten God.” Victories in Gettysburg and Vicksburg the following summer occasioned the 1864 proclamation; 1865’s National Day of Prayer was held June 1, in Lincoln’s memory. Continue Reading →
The Puritan's Dilemma
What do Tea Partiers and Jonathan Safran Foer have in common?
By Scott Korb
One afternoon last week, I read both Ben McGrath Continue Reading →
Hollow Trunks
Several years ago, I began writing and editing book reviews for The Revealer. As you probably know, there was a time between then and now when things slowed down on the site. I was out of touch with with it for a time. With this first post of 2010, an essay in defense of criticism, I’m resuming my role.
I was abroad during Christmastime and over the New Year. While traveling I received a “Happy New Year!” email from a writer I know named Justin Jamail, who’d recently relocated to Tokyo. “It was a rough introduction to work life here. I felt like I was in one of those training scenes from the Rocky movies, except that it took place in a Hermann Miller chair in front of a computer instead of a gym.” With this email, he included a longish response to James Wood’s November 30, 2009 New Yorker review of the novels of Paul Auster. Justin sent this not knowing my plans to rejoin The Revealer, and was up front with me that Auster is “a personal friend.” He also reminded me of a review I wrote of Auster’s 2003 novel, The Book of Illusions. “I think I remember your not liking Auster’s books either,” he wrote, “and if so, that might make you a fair judge of this response.” It’s true. In 2003, I did not like The Book of Illusions. (I later admitted to another friend, “I ended up reviewing it, badly, I think, looking back.”)
Moving forward, The Revealer will review books and comment on the book world in the specific context of religion and the media. (In other words, what follows is not perfectly representative of what we’ll be up to here.) Indeed, James Wood, a regular writer on religion, will surely come up again. What we’ll be interested in posting is the kind of review Justin encourages below, which takes an author, in Dryden’s words, “on the strongest side.”
Scott Korb
……
By Justin Jamail
A Man who is resolv Continue Reading →
The Faith Between Us
Now in bookstores! The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God, by Revealer contributing editor Scott Korb and Killing the Buddha contributor Peter Bebergal. Continue Reading →