Authenticity

I don't consider the Society for Creative Anachronism to be neo-primitivism, exactly, but what Mr. Potter says about authenticity hits close to home.  I've been thinking of authenticity as a near-religious term for quite a while now:The moral imperative driving  this is what we can call the quest for authenticity. This is the search for meaning in a world that is...

More (and more chilling) German folk tales

This Salon article talks about "darker-than-Grimm stories" recently discovered in a German archive and now published in English translation.  That cutesy description rang alarm bells for me, but to my surprise the interview with the translator, Maria Tatar, is really substantial. Congrats to the interviewer, Laura Miller, for doing such a good  job.Some...

Timbuktu

Gotta see this fi...

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991, by Eric J. Hobsbawm

It has been almost a quarter-century since Eric Hobsbawm the daring step of writing history from the outbreak of World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And only now am I getting around to reading it.This is not a book that I think I would ever read from cover to cover. It is a long one. However, it is so interesting in its many details and its many passages of analysis...

Peregrine: Secundus, by Avram Davidson

I recently re-read Peregrine: Secundus, the second book in what seems like an unfinished series by science fiction and fantasy writer Avram Davidson.  Davidson, who seems to have been a classically-educated eccentric, judging by what he chose to write and what he actually produced,...

The Crusades: defensive wars?

Recently experts on the Crusades have got a reasonable amount of press on whether the Crusades should be condemned or not. One statement made by several of them is that the Crusades were justifiable as defensive wars against Muslim aggression.Iff you look at maps illustrating the course the Crusades, you usually will see a fairly clear back-and-forth boundary between Christian...

Bronze-age Iraq today -- thanks to Salon

...

Fighting the Islamic State

From Foreign Policy:The war against the Islamic State, and the brand of extremist violence it exemplifies, won’t be won or lost on the battlefield. Defeating the group, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said Thursday, will instead first require debunking the ideological propaganda the group spews to justify its killing.Speaking at the U.S. Holocaust...

The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany, by B. Ann Tlusty

Ken Mondschein's review will tell you whether you can live without this book: B. Ann Tlusty’s The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany is one of those books that simultaneously delights and frustrates the reviewer: Delight, for the immense wealth of valuable material it contains,...

Public pagan worship to return to Iceland

According to the Globe and Mail, they are building a temple: “I don’t believe anyone believes in a one-eyed man who is riding about on a horse with eight feet,” said Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson, high priest of Asatruarfelagid, an association that promotes faith in the Norse gods. “We...

The American Civil War as a global struggle

Excerpted “The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War”by Don H. Doyle in a recent Salon: While the war was being fought on the battlefields of Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, another contest was waged overseas. The Confederacy sought international recognition and alliances to secure independence, and the Union was determined not to let that...

The end of Christianity in Iraq?

From NPR:Piece By Piece, Monks Scramble To Preserve Iraq's Christian HistoryNo, the Middle Ages are not ov...