I haven't changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That's what modernism mean...
The Met is such a powerful place for me because it's a natural connection between the ancient world and the modern world. And when you're dealing with ancient mythology, trying to put a modern spin on it, you really can't do much better than to call ...
Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law - to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still pa...
Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of ...
I draw a distinction between traditional Islam and Islamism. Islamism emerged in its modern form in the 1920s and is driven by a belief that Muslims can be strong and rich again if they follow the Islamic law severely and in its entirety. This is a r...
I started digging and found that Israel signed a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates after the country had diversified their economy, instead of being solely oil-based. This diversification had brought about modernization. I realized that if y...
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech...
The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in o...
John Oldman: I suspect I saw the British Isles from what is now the French coast. Huge mountains on the other side of an enormous deep valley that was shadowed by the setting sun. This was before they were separated from the continent by the rising s...
These comments recall Turkle's distinction between two kinds of "transparency" in technological cultures. Modernist transparency is the notion that users can and should have access to the inner workings of a technology. It evokes the aesthetic of ear...
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered...it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wande...
Let my worship be within the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals. Therefore, let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.
And you who seek to know me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: For if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.
if admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lackey of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an universal problem.
Your Majesty, I'm afraid everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong," said Major Sir Michael Parker, an impresario for royal events with an expertise in pyrotechnics. "Oh good, what fun!" she replied with a smile.
The saint is the apology for the Christian religion. He is holy, however, because he allows Christ to live in him and it is in Christ that he "glories".
The mass depiction of the modern woman as a "beauty" is a contradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, "beauty" is by definition inert, timeless, and generic. That this hallucination i...
As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.
They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being.
If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullie...
The advantage of a permanent emergency for the executive is that even trivial things can routinely be accomplished by the crisis presidency. If everything is an emergency, all power is emergency power.
