Friday Links
May 3, 2024
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Aristophanes and Timeless Comedy: A Conversation with A. M. Juster
Benjamin P. Myers reviews B. H. Fairchild’s An Ordinary Life
Forgiveness Is Not Fair by Johann Christoph Arnold
Mark Hemingway on Ryan Adams and the possibilities of redemption
D. C. Schindler on Retrieving Freedom: The Givenness of Freedom
Collegium Seminar on Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathens Rage?
Aristophanes and Timeless Comedy: A Conversation with A. M. Juster
In this Antheneum Review podcast, A. M. Juster joins them to talk about “how Gerytades was lost and found; what makes for great comedy; timeliness and timelessness in human nature; how to approach a play that survives in fragments; the fate of light verse; literature, humor, and the underworld; approaches to translating Latin; and much more!”
Benjamin P. Myers reviews B. H. Fairchild’s An Ordinary Life
Even in America we are, all of us, living with the past. That, in Eliot’s words, “all time is eternally present” may be especially evident in the aged habitations of New England, but the broad and open southern plains, although they may look like a blank slate, are also haunted. There are, after all, fathers and sons there, and complicated relationships produce ghosts. This much is evident in B. H. Fairchild’s latest collection of poetry, An Ordinary Life.
Forgiveness Is Not Fair by Johann Christoph Arnold
Not that we should swallow our hurts. On the contrary, people who push their grievances down into their subconscious in an attempt to forget them only cripple themselves. Before we can forgive a hurt, we must be able to name it. Sometimes it may not be possible (or helpful, even if it is possible) to confront the person we are struggling to forgive, and then the best solution is to share our pain with someone else we trust. Once we have done this, we must let go. Otherwise we may remain resentful forever, waiting for an apology that never comes. And we will remain separated from God.
Mark Hemingway on Ryan Adams and the possibilities of redemption
Hemingway writes about Ryan Adams, the incredibly talented singer-songwriter who was cancelled for his vile behavior towards women. There’s no excuse for what he did, but people do terrible things and yet redemption is always possible. It seems that Adams is finding a way to climb out of the depravity in which he lived:
The guitar has started talking to me again. I dream songs like I used to when I was 25. It’s been a lot of leaps over scary crevasses. This past year has also just been fun. I feel joy. I see God in everything. I feel alive. Even when I am dizzy. Especially when I am unwell. That is a huge leap for me. To not panic when people abandon me. That God opens a door when one closes. That a path meant for you is sometimes one step away.
Take a listen to two of my favorite Ryan Adams’ songs: “Oh My Sweet Carolina” and “La Cienega Just Smiled”. And here’s one with his old band, Whiskeytown, “A Song for You”. I’m praying for him today.
D. C. Schindler on Retrieving Freedom: The Givenness of Freedom
To say it again, freedom has an origin. There can be no freedom if there is no God at the origin of all things, no God who is at once Creator and Liberator of the world, who is free of his very being, whose nature it is to be both free and freeing. To be both free and freeing, this God must be able to give rise to a world that has its own reality in itself, its own principle of self-originating self-motion, which exists in some fundamental way in itself and from itself. This God must not, then, stand in radical competition with this creaturely reality but must be able to share its reality himself, which is to say to enter into its history and to establish that history tout court, giving a liberating, theological sanction to what is in its essence a wholly natural reality. And this God must be able to do so because he is already in himself, in his own inner being, something like a reciprocity of wills, a reciprocity of freedom joined in love—a love that both generates and results from a nonreductive relation that can be perfectly, numerically one without being any less a reciprocity between abiding others.
Collegium Seminar on Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathens Rage?
Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things for our summer Global Catholic Literature Series on Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage? Mondays in June. For more info and registration, follow the link. I have no doubt this will be fantastic.
