For much of the time during the first several months of lockdown, Transpositions was on its usual summer break, but we did stay aware and connected with the unique ways in which both the arts and theology could speak into…
A new year is upon us at Transpositions, and what an odd one it is! Like so many, we are navigating the strange time of starting an academic year in the midst of a pandemic. Unlike many, however, we are…
‘At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue: To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.’ So wrote Milton of his shepherd-poet, his ‘uncouth swain’, at the end of Lycidas. Whether or not I meet Milton’s definition of an ‘uncouth…
Editor’s Note: Dan Drage also interviewed Aaron Rosen, one of the curators of the Home Alone Together exhibition, about the origins and goals of the project. You may read their conversation here. ‘Together’ is a word which carries unusually poignant…
Editor’s note: In addition to interviewing Aaron Rosen, Dan Drage also reviewed the Home Alone Together exhibition hosted by Image. You may find his review here. Although Aaron Rosen is the Visual Arts Editor for the journal Image, he is also quite a…
In a novel tasked with depicting the ‘positively good man’, it is significant that the majority of characters who are characterized as ‘good’ in The Idiot are consistently described as children, whether they be actual children, naïve adults, or terminally…
Dostoevsky offers many interesting theological threads to follow in The Idiot, and, for me, amid all of its chaotic conversations I found a compelling account of communion in the dialogic partnership of Prince Myshkin and Lizaveta Prokofievna. This account was…
I. Henri de Lubac observes that ‘Dostoevsky’s books abound in atheists’. [1] The novelist explores the ‘psychology of unbelief’ by making many of his most arresting characters non-believers and nihilists. [2] George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson offer that Dostoevsky…
In a letter written in 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky gives a memorable account of the self as an obstacle to the act of Christ-like love: To love a person, as oneself, according to Christ’s commandment, is impossible. The law of the…