In This House We Believe: The Protestant Roots of Wokeness

In 2017 the pseudonymous blogger Spotted Toad appears to have coined the term “The Great Awokening” to denote the decade of identity politics mania that began about 2013. His joke was of course a pun upon the various Great Awakening religious revivals that periodically swept Protestant America in the 1730s and the early 1800s (especially in upstate New York’s “burned-over district”), and the liberal Social Gospel movement of the late 19th century that inspired humanitarian reformers such as Jane Addams. But Protestant history, which was long recognized as absolutely central to ...

Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

Paint It Black

I don’t know about you, but whenever I find myself looking at a sublime old landscape painting, like those of JMW Turner or Samuel Palmer, I often find myself thinking: “Hmm. ...

Louvre Museum, Paris

There’s No Future in Museums of the Past

About twenty years ago I made a visit to my favorite local museum to see what had been made of it following a very substantial renovation. I was hoping to discover some exciting ...

Unjuried, Uncensored…Until Now

The fringe theater festival movement is one of the countless liberatory and transgressive developments in the Western arts in the 160 years since the 1863 Salon des Refusés ...

The Taj Mahal, Agra

The New Black Gold

Recently I spent a couple of days in Dubai-on-Thames, formerly known as London. The south bank of the river has been transformed by glass and steel buildings, second-rate even by ...

Empty Frames

When I was still practicing as a doctor I believed, always mistakenly, that I had now heard every variety of human folly. However, even the dullest person can be highly original ...

Cristiano Ronaldo

Like Water for Coca-Cola

Sometimes a tiny episode or gesture reveals a lot about the world in which we live. Such an episode was the press conference given recently by the famous Portuguese footballer ...

Salvador Dali

Dalí at the Kremlin

“The Russian Revolution is the French Revolution which arrives late because of the cold weather,” said Salvador Dalí. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, but has great ...

The Pursuit of Racial Amity

Pondering the smoking ruins of American racial policy, I wonder whether it isn"€™t time to say publicly what many, if not most, of both races know: It isn"€™t working. It ...

Basel on the Beach

Last weekend, in an attempt to uncover the mysteries of the contemporary art market, I put on my great uncle's Lederhosen and posed as an eccentric Austrian collector at Art Basel ...

Mad Man

The sharply contrasting careers of two Slavic-American artists who both died in 1987, the droll commercial illustrator Andy Warhol and the titanic sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski, ...

White Goddess

It has been suggested that Sarah Palin is a sort of Rorschach test for Americans. The attractive, religious and fertile White woman drove the ugly, secular and barren White ...

Suicide by Multiculturalism

The charade is up. It's now apparent that Nidal Hasan was acting upon the Islamic doctrine of holy war when he carried out mass murder at Fort Hood. But will this fact, like so ...

Multiplication Tables

No one can accuse Mandolyna Theodoracopulos of not being provocative, and I read her recent post “Jon and Kate Plus Hate” with interest.  I entirely agree with her ...


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