Skip to main content

Neuhaus's New Earth?

A quick flashback (not too far back) to my reading of Wright's Surprised by Hope - a task interrupted by Harry Potter, bad teen fiction, and the celebration of Neil Gaiman's transcendentalism - has me going through Neuhaus's response to the book in my ignored April edition of First Things. Happy in his words, I hop back on the journal's website (I have not been checking it as frequently lately. My sense of self-injury as I nobly tackle faithful loan payments and responsible budgeting by working two jobs has seriously cut down on my intellectual and social pursuits, adding to my impatience with an admixture of self-pity and self-contempt. In other words, I don't have the brain power to keep up with these things.). It seems that Neuhaus is tackling Wright's own issue from an entirely different slant. I am curious. I read his previous articles on the same topic. I find his thoughts are soon to be compiled as a book. I am excited. I wonder if it will really be a Neuhaus version of Surprised by Hope or something completely different (his focus is on the comparison of the present world with the Old Testament Babylon, a concept I have not yet encountered in Wright's book. In other words, I am making the comparison between the two books all by my onesies. No foundation in the authors' own self-representations.)

Anyway, if you care to read Neuhaus's first epistle on the subject, follow the link here. Then you can see for yourself what I'm talking about instead of following my rambling-which-ultimately-says-nothing-constructive. I have blamed my rambling on the hour. Now I must blame it on too much coffee, too little food. And not being in the mood to edit myself.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can someone please explain why my Quicktime isn't working? Anyone with prophetic awareness of my little Atlas, none so old but recently behaving so?
8 comments
Read more
because you were all wondering what I'm writing my dissertation on, here's a brief synopsis of my 'research context': When James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry in 1760, he went to great lengths to make the Fragments appear to be authentic remains of an ancient, heroic oral tradition. His reasons for this were largely political, and as such, influenced the content of the epics themselves. As an attempt to establish a particularly Scottish identity, the poems were quite effective. However, to do so required both a simplification and a manipulation of traditional mythology. Stripped of anagogical significance, the Ossian epics more or less represented an Enlightenment version of history, tradition, and mythic heritage. The stories themselves were changed by their very purpose and in turn changed the manner of representing myth in future narratives. Moreover, the emphasis on the Ossian epics as authentic tales from the past, as ‘fragments,’ served...
6 comments
Read more
Rounding out my year of dwelling in the Athens of the North, as Edinburgh was called during the Enlightenment, I have experienced the shortest night of my memory. Around eleven o'clock last night, I closed the curtains to a sky streaked with the dark blue of a finally setting sun. I fully intended to drop off to sleep immediately after, but as I usually do, found myself still putting around after two in the morning. Between the curtains, which I had not closed as well as I should have, I noticed something unusual. There was unnaturally natural light streaming through. I opened them wide only to find the sky streaked with the same blue they had been filled with but three hours before. Had there been any night at all? If so, I had closed my curtains to it, only to find morning rising just as sleep found me - morning in the middle of the night. Long live Scotland.
5 comments
Read more