Food can have a transportive quality that can transcend where or when you are and take you somewhere and sometime else. However, food’s histories and transcendent qualities are never only personal.

Krystal Marsh eats her way across history

The term ‘folk opera’ draws attention to Hadestown’s connection with other Orphean music dramas, placing it in a genealogy with earlier operas that take the myth of Orpheus as their subject.

Jacob Martin follows Orpheus’s song through the ages

The pandemic has made many acutely aware of the absence or presence of solitude in one’s life—in crowded households, its paucity, and in bachelor pads, its excess.

Suzannah Cady reviews A History of Solitude

This absurdity is at the heart of what makes the film profound. “The Happening” depicts our impaired ability to grapple with that which fails to make logical, rational sense.

Katherine Kurtz watches the The Happening for guidance in 2020.

Here is the simple truth on which Dickens has founded his Tale, a truth that still resonates today. It is still the best of times, still the worst of times, but there is no time that cannot be redeemed by love.

Dwight Lindley finds a stark decision in Charles Dickens.

My father’s obituary was simple. It read, ‘Charles D. Marsh/Garretson, 53, a lifelong resident of Jersey City passed away on May 3rd, 2020, at Hoboken University Hospital.’

Krystal Marsh on genealogies, Shakespeare, and memory.

This is something I can trust. Something I can give myself to, because in giving myself to it I don’t abandon my judgment, or foreswear my world. I set my eyes to work. I look into the painting. I look for how it shows itself to me. And I try to see what truth can be found there.

Tom Break on the hard road to truth.

Making oneself look at the painting becomes a forcible quieting of the mind. And because the work requires looking with attention, what you see, at the end of the looking, you see consciously.

Tom Break traces spiritual art from Abbot Suger to Ad Reinhardt.

Coronavirus limitations actually present American orchestras with an excellent opportunity to explore music that American audiences rarely hear and to experiment with both old and new ways to perform classical music.

Jacob Martin looks for new paths for orchestral music.

Two containers with a temple complex: a ship and a mailbox. Both drip with blood drawn in white heat of colonial suspicions of rebellion and rights to autonomy.

Maggie Slaughter exposes colonialism and orientalism in a mailbox and a passenger ship

Franz kneels before the priest. It is nighttime and the cell is utterly dark save for one luminous candle. This is the light that shines in the darkness. And the darkness cannot overcome it.

Jeffrey Wald examines the power of cinema in the modern world.

Perhaps there’s another way of understanding what’s at issue in the western tradition—not a narrative but an ethos; not a straightforward story of development but an idea that resurges in the history of western art and reaches a kind of fever pitch in the modernist project.

Tom Break rethinks modern art’s relationship with the western art tradition

It is time to set aside the troubled histories of past confrontations and takeovers and strive for healing and reconciliation, by advocating to open the doors of these sites to all faiths who are invested in them.

Sahar Hosseini on the Hagia Sophia and spaces of encounter

Early modern communities faced an identity crisis in which their very beings seemed constantly at-risk and in-flux. Antitheatricalists believed theater made these problems worse by turning them into a spectacle.

Krystal Marsh compares 17th Century Theater to 21st Century Comedy Central.

A central concern remains: the timing and nature of India’s encounter with modernity. Did modernity come with the East India Company or did modernity have more ‘native’ roots?

Devin Creed looks for a different modernity in the streets of New Delhi.

Chivalry is an attempt to internalize restraints so that powerful men police one another and themselves—masculinity taming the excesses of masculinity.

Kathryn Mogk reassesses chivalry amidst the Me-Too era and deepening concerns about police violence.

Ultimately, nobody is interested in hermeneutics and intertextuality for their own sake … but everyone wants to know what is real and how we should live, and if books can help us there, interpretation becomes intensely interesting.

Kathryn Mogk rediscovers reading with Augustine.

The windows at Conques, seen from the outside, seem to be walled with a metal sheet.

Donato Loia examines the old and the new with Pierre Soulages’s modernist windows in a Romanesque church.

Dark as this may seem, it opens the door to the only true agency that we have in such circumstances: the choice between hope and despair, between faith and doubt.

Micah Heinz reads Albert Camus during the Coronavirus.

Tracing art’s genealogy, we find that she is not the sister of religion, an equal rival, but a daughter.

Kathryn Mogk reads Station Eleven during the coronavirus.