Sinner, Scholar, Saint

Douglas Kries reviews Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, by Robin Lane Fox, at Claremont Review of Books.

Virginia Woolf: author, publisher, feminist

Emily Tobin at OUP blog

From the Center: Adler on cooperative arts, and on prudence;

Recent communications with members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Mortimer Adler on the three cooperative arts
• Adler on prudence as one of The Great Ideas
• Biographical note on Aristotle

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Galileo Fought Dirty With His Fellow Scientists

'The Italian astronomer had critics inside and outside the Church.'

Christopher Graney at The Atlantic

Liberalism and capitalism have hollowed out society – so where do we turn now?

Rowan Williams reviews The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future, by John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, at New Statesman.

Experts don’t agree on age of Saturn’s rings

'Data from orbiting Cassini craft may help resolve debate'

Christopher Crockett at Science News

The True and Only Lasch: On 'The True and Only Heaven', 25 Years Later

Susan McWilliams at Modern Age

If there comes a time when the Additional Bibliography for The Great Idea of Progress in the Syntopicon is to be updated, I suggest this work.

Conscious exotica

'From algorithms to aliens, could humans ever understand minds that are radically unlike our own?'

Murray Shanahan at Aeon (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek

At Open Culture (via Billy Mills)

From the Center: Adler on beauty; and on pluralism;

Recent communications with members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Mortimer Adler on the idea of beauty as something admirable
• On Jeff Mason on death
• Adler on pluralism

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Mortimer Adler's 'Syntopicon'

John Barger, in "The prehistory of AI", in "An overview of Artificial Intelligence", at Robot Wisdom

At Land Art Mongolia

Lewis Biggs at London Review of Books.

"I was bound for the fourth Land Art Mongolia biennial, a kind of residency or production workshop for nine Mongolian artists and nine from the rest of the world. The campsite, we were told, was near Dariganga, in the lea of Altan Ovoo, a volcanic hill and a famous pilgrimage site for both Shamanists and Buddhists."

Hamilton Versus History

Richard Samuelson on Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda, at Claremont Review of Books.

Cruel intentions

Will Rees on Søren Kierkegaard and his works at Times Literary Supplement

The Book-of-the-Millennium Club

Dwight Macdonald reviewed Great Books of the Western World (1st Ed. 1952) at The New Yorker

From the Center: Adler on classics, on prophecy, and on leisure;

Recent communications with members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Mortimer Adler on overrated classics
• On A. C. Grayling and books on being good
• Adler on prophecy as one of The Great Ideas
• Biographical note on Plato
• On John F. Kihlstrom and threats to reason in moral judgment
• On Nicholas Tampio and what philosophy encompasses
• On Charlotte Curtis and Mortimer Adler on leisure and reading

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from the 'Life of Homer'

Two excerpts from this Roman "biography", at Sententiae Antiquae, Homer Might Have Been Roman or Egyptian (Life of Homer, 6; Part 1) and The Origins of Homer’s Blindness.