How a true artist looks when he "joins the party": Dmitri Shostakovich, 1950.
Author: David Lloyd Dusenbury
David Lloyd Dusenbury is a philosopher, historian of ideas, Times Literary Supplement contributor and senior fellow at Budapest's Danube Institute. The author of I Judge No One and The Innocence of Pontius Pilate (published by Hurst and Oxford University Press), he is also Chair for Jewish-Christian Relations at the University of Antwerp.
Our Dmitri
Pondering, for the first time in years, the survival of lush, Romantic music in Soviet Russia after its precipitous decline in Europe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGkbI8beN9I
Sylvana Tomaselli reviews “The Innocence of Pontius Pilate”
Sylvana Tomaselli, Countess of St Andrews, has written a very generous review of The Innocence of Pontius Pilate for Catholic Herald. "Its range is nothing short of extraordinary. From Matthew, Mark and Luke, the Babylonian Talmud and the Qur’an, David Lloyd Dusenbury takes the reader to a variety of texts from well and lesser-known Roman,… Continue reading Sylvana Tomaselli reviews “The Innocence of Pontius Pilate”
McGill University book launch: “The Innocence of Pontius Pilate”
My opening remarks at McGill University's book launch for The Innocence of Pontius Pilate have been posted by the Newman Centre. See here. In these brief remarks, I circle the question of how the Roman trial of Jesus shaped new theories of religious toleration in early modern Europe, setting out from Thomas Hobbes's bold assertion… Continue reading McGill University book launch: “The Innocence of Pontius Pilate”
Herbert & Herbert – two brothers, & two deities
How extraordinary! I am reminded that Lord Herbert of Cherbury (pictured), one of the first English Deists, was the brother of George Herbert, poet of extreme Innerlichkeit.
17th-century “death drive”
John Webster intuiting Sabina Spielrein's & Sigmund Freud's "death drive" in 1623: "Heaven fashioned us of nothing, & we strive To bring ourselves to nothing." The Duchess of Malfi, act III, scene 5
Foucault: “We might wonder”
Reading vol. 4 of Foucault's History of Sexuality for the Times Literary Supplement, I still can't quite believe he wrote these lines in the first pages of vol. 1: "Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form - so familiar and important in the West - of preaching. A great… Continue reading Foucault: “We might wonder”
Leibniz: “We are fortunate”
A Sunday morning thought, from one of the inventors of infinitesimal calculus: "We are fortunate that God is more charitable than humans." - G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 18; trans. P. Remnant & J. Bennett (Cambridge, 1996), p. 502
“In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind …”
"As St. Augustine said: 'One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is.' I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one's rattling throat, not the black hum in one's ears fading to nothing in nothing. I… Continue reading “In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind …”
“Something infinite has been lost”
"Diodors Siculus relates the story of a broken and scattered god; who of us has never felt, while walking through the twilight or writing a date from his past, that something infinite has been lost?" - Jorge Luis Borges, "Paradiso, XXXI, 108" Borges in Paris
D. L. Dusenbury 