Pathways
Trick-or-treaters come tomorrow. Snopes has a useful and surprisingly complex genealogy of the celebration of Halloween.
The accession of Emperor Naruhito to the Japanese throne this month brings up the continually contested question of the role of the emperor in relation to the Japanese constitution and the theory of kokutai.
The launch of Australian National University’s Research Centre for Deep History is a cross-disciplinary investigation into Aboriginal history prior to European colonization: “I always felt frustrated that the history I wrote and everyone in the field of Aboriginal history wrote began in 1770 or 1788,” said Professor McGrath, a historian at the Australian National University. “It was re-inscribing ‘history’, as always beginning with the coming of the Europeans and the beginnings of British sovereignty. So I’ve long had this aim of wanting to look at the full human history of the Australian continent.”
A wide-ranging essay in Aeon explores the troubling realities of capitalism in the modern world and offers a genealogy of those who envisioned alternatives, from Marx and Engels to Simone Weil, as well as some lesser-known thinkers and leaders, such as the Diggers’ Gerrard Winstanley and the Social Gospelers.
The auction house Sotheby’s held its third annual Modernités auction. Sales included “Medea (1929) by Francis Picabia… a large painting by Marc Chagall entitled Le Cirque Mauve (1966)… [and] René Magritte’s L’Incorruptible (1940).” The works on display featured turn-of-the-century artists’ interest in the spiritual and occult in an attempt to break the “ironclad view of modern art as a succession of ‘isms’.”
Warhol’s Raphael Madonna-$6.99, shown in a new exhibit at the Warhol Museum
Also from the art world, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh showcases the artist’s “complex relationship with Catholicism,” including his work “****,” which was commissioned by the Catholic Church.
Books out: An edited volume explores Islamic modernity. Its final chapter is titled “Society, The Immanent Frame, and Modernity – Concepts, Spins, and Genealogies.” Stay tuned to the blog for a review. A new biography of Luther by Christine Helmer addresses him as “an important theological resource for confronting today the dark side of the modernity” and attempts to “reassert the historical Luther as a Catholic aiming to reform Catholicism.”
Parents have long felt that U.S. students have too much homework. This article gives a genealogy of that modern anxiety.
Last, and probably least, an 18th-century shot glass turns up in a Scottish pub. Bottoms up!
