Nick Spencer reviews my newest book in the world's oldest magazine: "The Innocence of Pontius Pilate is a model of intelligent, accessible and persuasive scholarship." Read more at The Spectator.
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Oxford, New York: “The Innocence of Pontius Pilate”
It's heartening to see the work of a half-decade announced by Oxford in New York. Copies will ship in the United States on 1 July.
“My book”
"M. Pascal used to say of those authors who always refer to their works as, 'My book', that they sound like solid citizens with a place of their own, always talking about 'My house'. They would do better, this excellent man added, to say, 'Our book', considering that there is usually more of other people's… Continue reading “My book”
“In this world-age there is no perfect love”
en icest siecle nen at parfite amour la vide est fraile, n'i at durable onour "In this world-age there is no perfect love Life is frail, there is no lasting honour" Chanson d'Alexis (Song of Saint Alexius), 11th century, Old French - courtesy of Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, ch. 5.
A motto: S. Kierkegaard
A motto: "Like one who rows a boat, I turn my back toward the goal." - S. Kierkegaard, "In Order to Philosophize, One Must have Doubted", 1844 Fotografi efter blyantstegning udført ca. 1840 af N. C. Kierkegaard
“The philosophical commandment” (al-waṣiyya al-falsafiyya)
An 11th-century Syrian Christian, Abdallah ibn al-Fadl, called Jesus' injunction to love others as we love ourselves "the philosophical commandment” (al-waṣiyya al-falsafiyya). Roughly 800 years later, Immanuel Kant said the same. And I am honoured to be writing a political life of Jesus this year, for C. Hurst in London. Lodewijk Schelfhout, Christus aan het… Continue reading “The philosophical commandment” (al-waṣiyya al-falsafiyya)
“World City” in new volume of Studia Patristica
I am delighted to have a contribution titled "World City" in the newest volume of Studia Patristica - adjacent an essay by the great Ilaria Ramelli, on pagan and Christian concepts of the world-generating Mind.
Announced: Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature (Oxford, 2021)
The cover is still in design - but I'm pleased to see that my Oxford book on Nemesius of Emesa (now Homs, Syria), and his "cosmopolitan anthropology", has a web page. Expected in August 2021.
Said’s definition of “Romance philology”
Surprised by Edward Said's definition of "Romance philology": "[T]he study of those literatures deriving from Latin but ideologically unintelligible without the Christian doctrine of Incarnation (and hence of the Roman Church) as well as its secular underpinning in the Holy Roman Empire."(Said's introduction to the reissue of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (Princeton, 2003), p. xi.)
“As serious as Geistesgeschichte”
"I am neo-frivolous ... and in secret I take my frivolity as seriously as Geistesgeschichte." Antal Szerb, "An Elegy for Books and Youth", 1938
