Pietro della Valle. Pietro della Valle was a highly sociable geek with an interest in all things Middle Eastern, c.…
Avitabile’s handwriting
history
Cults video throwsback to Jim Jones
Indie band Cults has released the official video for "Go Outside," which brings the fascinating and tragic story of the…
Religion as culture in “spiritual cultivation”
Despite its roots in a religious entity, OISCA [The Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement] is registered as a…
The geopolitical imperative?
Ritualistic evocations of "America" . . . and the deep-seated sense that somehow the United States is sacrosanct space—war, by…
O tedious selfhood, O aftertaste of splinters
It’s striking to me how often, with what little resistance, the many scholarly forums this book has now generated have…
The evolution of a text
In his 1915 essay, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Sigmund Freud wrote, “It is indeed impossible to…
The birth of a book
An old photograph provides a glimpse into a dismal cell at a Nazi prison called Tegel. Wan light falls in…
The “great sinner” myth
Confessions re-emerged into floodlit attention in the Romantic era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when it was…
History as a critical endeavor
A new journal, History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, edited by Joan Wallach Scott, among others.
History and the historyless
Buried in the middle of William James’s chapter on “The Sick Soul” in The Varieties of Religious Experience is the…