Social Science Research Council
The third rose
“Youth Without Youth” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence, sexual congress, female nudity, metaphysics.
So warns the caption to Manohla Dargis’s review
in the New York Times. [...]
Nancy Levene
Nancy Levene is an associate professor in the department of religious studies at Indiana University. She is author of Spinoza's Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and co-editor (with Peter Ochs) of Textual Reasonings: Jewish Philosophy and Text Study at the End of the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002). Her current research focuses on the modern refraction of medieval theological struggles with reason and its histories, pursuing the figure and the fantasy of Anselm of Canterbury in his confrontation with reason’s borders and gaps.
Posts by Nancy Levene:
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
The forces unleashed
Just what, or who, or where is religion for Lilla himself? Is the problem really the Bible—that, in addition to being modern, “we are heirs to the biblical tradition”? This seems so profoundly to beg the question. For what makes the Bible the Bible, if not the passion (“the forces unleashed”) that would so obviously survive its exile? What makes revelation (the divine light) different from lucidity (the natural light) if not the thing they precisely share: the appetite that drives human beings towards at once hedgehog-like commitments to the whole and fox-like commitments to the piecemeal and the plural. Reason and revelation are names for human desires, but from neither of these desires, then, can there be any separation.
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