Front Cover
Lorraine Tady, Octagon Vibration Series/Event Horizon after Monks Mound Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, IL, 2017. Acrylic and archival ink on canvas, 48 x 36 inches. Copyright © 2017 Lorraine Tady. Courtesy of the artist and Barry Whistler Gallery.
Introduction
Whither Athenaeum?
Above all, Athenaea are intimate—the opposite of mass culture, the spectacle, and the metrics of the digital era.
To Enlighten And Annoy
Einstein wrote that “all religions, arts and sciences aspiring to ennoble human existence are branches of the same tree.”
Current Affairs
The University in Flux
Love or fear of technology errs when in the extreme; technology with human interaction is the sort of symbiotic unity that benefits the student.
Avoiding an Unforced Error
Since democracy tends to “travel” through regional diffusion mechanisms, democracy aid to one country in a region has a high likelihood of contributing to a “contagion” effect.
Between Nature and History
If all principles of right are contingent upon history, then nihilism must result, for history is unstable and indeterminate.
The Past is Present
The Virgin, the Dynamo and the Tent
Having begun in the 1870s as a popular but academically rigorous alternative to university education, Chautauqua offered the opportunity for higher and broader education to the aspiring middle class.
The Best Books by Joseph Conrad
For Marlow, meaning for human existence can only come from confronting an empty universe and in the face of that knowledge maintaining an “inner strength.”
The Best Books on British Romanticism
The Romantics were the first artists to truly have to grapple with the role of art in the face of the growth of systematic scientific knowledge as we know recognize it.
Memories Written on the Body
Ernaux has landed on a narrative form that captures not only the workings of memory (the “thousands of notes” we keep to ourselves) but also the manic mood and mechanics of our digital age.
The Best Books in Christian Historical Fiction
Johnny Cash’s drug-addled soul identified with the troubled Saul; and Cash often described his own Damascene experience, in Nickajack Cave on the Tennessee River, in Pauline terms.
A Philosophical Friendship
David Hume and Adam Smith, both individually and through their joint attempt to create a new, all-inclusive “science of man,” can be seen to have lit fires that still kindle vigorously.
The Best Books on Athenian Democracy
When Grote published his monumental history, almost nobody believed that the ancient Athenian system was anything more than mob rule.
Folio
Works of art by Angela Kallus, Liz Trosper, Luke Harnden, and Bryan Florentin
Download a PDF copy of the folio.Senses of Place
The Other Ursula Le Guin
The realization that all humans share the “singular catastrophe of being alive,” is essential to the experience of being fully human.
Africa, Agency and the Anthropocene
The porousness between dream, thought, myth and reality is at the core of the indigenous worldview and in turn, its performance.
The Best Books on Finding Home in American Storytelling
American literature has always reflected a shared hope of finding home; the impulse to stake out a better life by moving to a new place is a recurring focus in our communal storytelling.
The Palate of Nations
However little we control, food is an area where we can exercise our wills and our desires, and also grab a little piece of our family history, our ethnic history, our planetary history.
Sciences and Arts
Digital Games, Science Fiction and the Death of Literature
Like literary works, video games can perform the didactic function of moral education as well if a video game incorporates a classic literary work into its designing.
The Wilcox Space
A Texas-raised, Colorado-educated, artist in rural California developed a profound originality largely because he was not part of a regional aesthetic tradition.
Poetic Misprision in Art and Science
The relationship between art and biology is in flux, as is that of the humanities and natural sciences, and of art history and neuroscience.
Womb and Doom: Frankenstein as Mother and Maker
The moral power of nature was waning in Shelley’s time. It diminished in proportion to the increase of the studies of physical power – lightning, Leyden jars, Voltaic piles, and most poignantly, electric eggs.
The Aesthetics Of The Axe
It says much about our fascination for everything prehistoric that the stone tools and shaped rocks recently exhibited in First Sculpture: From Handaxe to Figure Stone at the Nasher Sculpture Center did not seem out of place there.
