ellauri052.html on line 934: Ultimately, much of the book revolves around a perceived opposition between “young Saul,” the politically radical, amorously multitasking free spirit who raised him, and “old Saul,” the reactionary, race-baiting friend of authority and Allan Bloom who occupied his father’s body for its final 40 years. Greg had a front-row seat for Bellow’s supposed conversion, after the rise of black power and the Six Day War, to the unfashionable conservatism that remains the unspoken reason his books aren’t read much in America today. He is thus well-placed to describe how that change—dramatically evident in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), the neo-con novel par excellence, but also in Herzog—manifested itself in private.
ellauri360.html on line 445: Worldwide, Christianity is actually moving toward supernaturalism and [what he called] neo-orthodoxy, and in many ways toward the ancient world view expressed in the New Testament: a vision of Jesus as the embodiment of divine power, who overcomes the evil forces that inflict calamity and sickness upon the human race. Jenkins spoke especially of “the Global South” or those areas of the earth that Westerners once thought of as the Third World, and he argued that contemporary Christianity had shifted south and the earth’s preponderant weight appeared to be “pear-shaped.” In this south or Third World, Jenkins wrote, we find huge and growing Christian populations: at the dawning of the twenty-first century, 480 million in Latin America, 360 million in Africa, and 313 million in Asia, compared with 260 million in North America. The shift, he said, portended trouble for the traditional cultural empire of the North Atlantic, the liberal religious establishment. Perhaps the broadest public hint, Jenkins wrote, was provided by the 1998 Lambeth Conference, where southern Christians used their numerical clout to promote opinions thoroughly unfashionable in the North Atlantic (or the West). “Queen Victoria’s ex-empire,” said Jenkins, “from southern Africa to Singapore struck back.”
xxx/ellauri075.html on line 122: Today, Shestov is little known in the English-speaking world. This is partly because his works have not been readily available. Partly the specific themes he discusses are unfashionable and "foreign". A sombre and yet ecstatic atmosphere permeates his writings. And his quasi-nihilistic position and religious outlook are an unsettling and incongruous combination, at first sight.
xxx/ellauri075.html on line 182: Today, Shestov is little known in the English-speaking world. This is partly because his works have not been available in English. Partly the specific themes he discusses are unfashionable and "foreign". A sombre and yet ecstatic atmosphere permeates his writings. And his quasi-nihilistic position and religious outlook are an unsettling and incongruous combination, at first sight.
xxx/ellauri114.html on line 122: What more than anything is missing in recent films, and shines splendidly in Maxwell’s films, is the sense of glory, the feeling that some have lived on an elevated plane according to the dictates of the highest sense of duty and honor. It’s an unfashionable feeling today, and mocked by those who conspicuously lack it, who love weakly, who think solely in quotidian, political terms. It cannot be understood by those without religious faith, for Heaven is a City of Glory and glory is the special attribute of a God who, if hidden, nevertheless offers us a glimpse of the special virtue of his glory in the lives of those who in moments of danger are willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause they think greater than themselves; and that, above the messiness of political squabbles, is the message behind Maxwell’s films. (The American Spectator 2015)
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