What does it mean to be truly human? Such a query provokes a host of diverging responses ranging from the empiricist’s “propagation of the genome,” to the relativist’s “it means whatever you want,” or the inevitable “there is no answer…
We are pleased to be back in the saddle here at Transpositions after a luxuriously spent winter intermission. In a way, our return was forestalled for function as much as it was out of mere reverence for leisure. As you…
Over the past decade or so, the Protestant church in North America has experienced a revival of sorts. The revival of which I speak is the renaissance of hymnody. I first encountered this movement to resurrect the ancient hymns of…
A Review of Noah Charney, Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World’s Most Coveted Masterpiece. New York, Public Affairs, 2010. When I picked up this book, I wasn’t sure what to expect out of 288 pages on…
The previous two pieces in this series have attempted to use the figure of the monster to draw out some of the flaws and contradictions in Enlightenment understandings of the self. The monster can be a powerful didactic tool in…
Someone recently asked me about the books I like to read. My first impulse was to start naming books that have changed my life. But then I realized, the conversation we were having wasn’t about life-changing moments: it was about…
Sheila Hale, Titian: His Life. London: HarperPress, 2012, xxi + 832 pp., £30/ $39.99 hardback. Sheila Hale begins the introduction of her tome on the life of Titian (Tiziano Vicellio, c.1488/90 – 1576) with the following quote from Edward Said: “Any style…
Jay M. Price, Temples for a Modern God: Religious Architecture in Postwar America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 288 pp. | Cloth $78 Joseph M. Siry, Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture, Chicago: University of Chicago…
In my previous post, I introduced the epistemic shifts occurring across the theological, political and philosophical landscape of the early 1800s which gave rise to a new kind of theological expression, or, theo-literature. Writers from Schiller to Wordsworth to Coleridge…