Walter Goffart— Yale’s Elizabethan Club was founded in 1911, a big year not just at Yale. A pandemic in Manchuria was an unpromising start. This pneumonic plague was fully checked by the wearing of cloth facial masks. A tragic note was struck again by the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in
Bernard-Henri Lévy— The only debate that has truly engaged Europe and the United States is the one about the comparative vices and virtues of the Korean and Chinese, Thai or Singaporean, Confucian or liberal models for compelling people to meet health requirements. To their credit, a number of so-called learned
Ramsay MacMullen— At Nicaea in AD 325 some 200 bishops assembled. The total is not certain: perhaps a little below that figure, probably a little above it. Not all who attended signed, as was not unusual at the end of councils nor surprising at this one, given its special difficulties.
Edward L. Greenstein— Determining the time and place of the book’s composition is bound up with the nature of the book’s language. The Hebrew prose of the frame tale, notwithstanding many classic features, shows that it was composed in the post-Babylonian era (after 540 BCE). The poetic core of the
Kenneth Austin— On August 22, 1614, Vincenz Fettmilch, a Calvinist gingerbread-maker, led an attack on Frankfurt’s ghetto, a single street known as the Judengasse (“Jews’ Lane”). When it was first established, the community had about 150 residents; by the early seventeenth century, this number had risen to almost 2,000. Its
Barbara H. Rosenwein— We are tearing our body politic in two, and one reason why is that we simplify the idea of anger. We’ve all seen the headlines: “Global Anger Grows Over George Floyd Death”; “Indianapolis police fire tear gas to disperse angry crowds”; “Angry crowds set fire to Minneapolis
Susie Linfield— It’s a pleasant day in the summer of 2013, and I sit with a Jewish-Israeli intellectual in a lively Tel Aviv café. She is a member of the far Left who advocates a one-state solution and is adamantly anti-Zionist. (She has since emigrated from Israel.) She asks me
Erika Helgen— Protestantism has a long, complex history in Brazil, full of starts and stops, growth and stagnation, political and social transformations. The earliest manifestations of Protestantism were short-lived. French and Dutch Calvinists who competed with the Catholic Portuguese for supremacy in the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth
Kasia Boddy— In the last eighteen months of his short life, Richard Wright became obsessed with haiku. Since Wright was a self-declared “protest writer,” readers have struggled to reconcile these (4,000 or so) delicate experiments in verse with the hard-hitting naturalism of works such as Black Boy (1945) and Native
Matt Jackson-McCabe— One of the more intriguing questions in the history of religion is how the Jewish apostles of a first-century Jewish messiah came to be considered the authoritative embodiment of values fundamentally other than Jewish. Making sense of Christianity’s relationship to Judaism has been a problem ever since the