The Mourning Cloak
transformation & rebirth
recent posts
- Unconvinced.
- The Subversion of Morality: Reading Tang Wengming’s “Secret Subversion I: Mou Zongsan, Kant, and Early Confucianism.”
- Literature Strikes Back: A Reading of Cate I. Reilly’s “Psychic Empire: Literary Modernism and the Clinical State.”
- Birthquake: The Literary After-Shocks of the Great Kantō Earthquake in Arthur M. Mitchell’s “Disruptions of Daily Life.”
- Looking Good: A Review of Yasuda’s Beauty Matters.
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The book begins with a body, alive, but registering a deep visceral shock. A blow that is a cultural, political blow, but is experienced at the corporeal level. It is the story, and the body, of the former Tunisian dignitary Husayn Ibn ‘Abdallah who, like so many others experienced ‘the physical and mental traumas of…
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History of the book and history of religion are two of my areas of interest, and Spreading Buddha’s Word in East Asia: The Formation and Transformation of the Chinese Buddhist Canon is an impressive work of scholarship which bridges those fields to bring to life the story of the compilation of one of the world’s…
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El fascismo se cura leyendo, y el racismo se cura viajando Miguel de Unamuno. Unsourced quote. During the fascist years of Franco, in Spain, the Basque novelist Miguel de Unamuno was once presiding over a meeting at the University of Salamanca. The meeting was attended by people of diverse political backgrounds, including General Millan-Astray. The…
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Works Reviewed. Webster, Jamieson. Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 303 pages. Psychoanalysis, ever since its Freudian genesis, has been plagued by a certain categorical ambiguity; it touches on, and is set against, medicine, philosophy, religion, psychology, psychiatry, self-help, literature and so on. This ambiguity lends, perhaps,…
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Secularism is a complex idea, or set of ideas and practices, with a long history. Considerable thought and work has gone into tracing that history and much ink has been spilled. Charles Taylor, a Quebec-based philosopher, in his book A Secular Age outlines a perspectival shift from the Middle Ages in which it was almost…
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Works Reviewed: Christopher N. Phillips The Hymnal: A Reading History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2018. I remember my father once commenting, in an offhand way, that if you want to know about the theology of a particular church, you can just peruse their hymnals. Hymnals being such an essential part of the fabric of my own church experience, it hardly…
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Works Reviewed. Marder, Michael. Energy Dreams: Of Actuality. New York: Columbia University Press. 2017 . One needs little convincing, these days, that our world is burning. While the concept of hell no longer plays a significant role in religious piety – at least in the North Atlantic world – the daily news tells a different story. From the…
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A Meditation on Every Day. Every Day War is no longer declared, but rather continued. The outrageous has become the everyday. The hero is absent from the battle. The weak are moved into the firing zone. The uniform of the day is patience, the order of merit is the wretched star of hope over the…
The Mourning Cloak 