The endurance of Mary in Faith and Art // "It is certain because it is impossible."

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Holly Brubach

At a time when the weight of scientific evidence would seem to call into question the Bible’s account of history and the God who set it in motion, the Virgin Mary enjoys a kind of free pass. As the third-century Christian theologian Tertullian wrote of the Resurrection, “It is certain because it is impossible” — a notion that might well apply to the virgin birth; such a conundrum that it elevates Mary to a safe place, beyond logic. “Mary is here, right now,” declares Judith Dupré, author of “Full of Grace: Encountering Mary in Faith, Art and Life” (Random House).

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Thanksgiving, 1621 // Peace, Love, and... Puritanism?

Harvard Divinity's David D. Hall has published a fascinating Op/Ed in the Times this week which forces us to reconsider and re-imagine the Puritans as well as the meaning of Thanksgiving. Also keep in mind Hall's forthcoming book, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of public life in New England. Enjoy! -- Leif

Full Op/Ed Here // Excerpt Below

by David D. Hall

To return to the first of these harvest feasts is to return to the puzzling figure of the Puritan, the name borne by most of the English people who came to New England in the early 17th century. What did they hope to gain by coming to the New World, and what values did they seek to practice?

The easy answers simplify and distort. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who came along a couple of centuries later, bears some of the blame for the most repeated of the answers: that Puritans were self-righteous and authoritarian, bent on making everyone conform to a rigid set of rules and ostracizing everyone who disagreed with them. The colonists Hawthorne depicted in “The Scarlet Letter” lacked the human sympathies or “heart” he valued so highly. Over the years, Americans have added to Hawthorne’s unfriendly portrait with references to witch-hunting and harsh treatment of Native Americans.

Contrary to Hawthorne’s assertions of self-righteousness, the colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another. Celebrating the liberty they had gained by coming to the New World, they echoed St. Paul’s assertion that true liberty was inseparable from the obligation to serve others.

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Saul Bellow's "Letters" // Dispatches and Details from a Life in Literature

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Michiko Kakutani

Herzog, the title character of Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel, is famously a writer of letters he never sends, letters to friends, rivals, relatives and strangers; letters that satisfy his craving “to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.” The letters are, by turns, cranky, coruscating, clever and cerebral: the outpourings of a man overflowing with ideas and grievances, and reeling from the complications of his life and the stubborn mystifications of the world around him. The real-life letters of Herzog’s creator turn out to be just as arresting, seizing the reader by the lapels and refusing to let go.

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Two Worlds // Torn Between the Artistic and Religious establishments

The hits keep coming from Transpositions, the blog of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews. Their latest must-read arrives via Tanya Walker, a PhD student in Divinity at St. Andrews, on young Christian artists being torn between the aesthetic and religious establishments. An excellent piece. Enjoy! -- Leif

Full Essay Here // Excerpt Below

by Tanya Walker

I recently asked 24 young artists who were Christians to consider two questions:

What does your craft require of you?

What does the church require of your craft?

Their answers revealed the tensions they felt trying to “fit” into two worlds whose differing values seemed to pull them in opposite directions.

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Found in Translation (Part 3) // How the author of "The Hours" learned to write for his reader, not himself

Back in September, New Creation brought you the first two installments of an on-going series of posts exploring literary translation. These first two posts were comprised of interviews with Charlotte Mandell and Esther Allen. Now comes a third installment by way of Michael Cunningham's Op/Ed. Enjoy! -- Leif

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

AS the author of “Las Horas,” “Die Stunden” and “De Uren” — ostensibly the Spanish, German and Dutch translations of my book “The Hours," but actually unique works in their own right — I’ve come to understand that all literature is a product of translation. That is, translation is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well. “Translation” as a human act is, like so many human acts, a far more complicated proposition than it may initially seem to be.

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In Defense of "Naive" Reading // Robert Pippin considers the proper place of "the arts" in the academy

Full Op/Ed here // Excerpt Below

by Robert Pippin

Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the “arts.”

Likewise ─ and this is a much more controversial thesis ─ such works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge — exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the phronimos)or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l’espirit géometrique and l’espirit de finesse — is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for “naïve” reading, teaching and writing — an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy.

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Healing Ways // A Conversation With Acclaimed Hispanic Novelist Rudolfo Anaya

Listen to the conversation Here // Description Below

from: ARTWorks (blog of the NEA)

Anaya first made his name with his novel, Bless Me, Ultima (an NEA Big Read selection), about a Hispanic boy growing up in New Mexico facing the challenges of education versus tradition and faith versus doubt.

Anaya talks in the podcast about writing the novel and the importance of spirituality in our lives. In this excerpt, Anaya talks about how spirituality and the love of nature come out of the traditions of the indigenous culture. [:49]

Listen to the conversation here.

Kafka's Last Trial // The unbelievable publishing story behind one of the 20th century's greatest writers

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Elif Bautman

[read a previous New Creation post by/about Bautman, "Between Art and Criticism," by following this link]

During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border.

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Found in Translation (Part II) // Esther Allen discusses her work

Back on September 1st, New Creation brought you this interview with Charlotte Mandell concerning the life and work of translation. Now comes a second part in this series of discussions with translators (this time with Esther Allen) from Artworks, the blog of The National Endowment for the Arts. Enjoy! -- Leif

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

From Artworks

NEA: How do you balance your own creative voice with the voice of the source text when translating?

ESTHER ALLEN: Here I’ll send you back to my response to the first question: first and foremost, I have to translate work I believe in. Sometimes there is no more effective way of saying what you want to say than through a translation. One excellent example of this can be found in the life of the 19th-century Cuban revolutionary José Martí, whom I’ve translated extensively. He spent a lot of time and money translating Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona into Spanish, publishing it himself, and doing his best to distribute it throughout the Spanish-speaking world in the mid-1880s. He did this because he saw Ramona as a testimony to the threat that Anglo-American expansion posed to Hispanic and indigenous peoples—and since it was written by an Anglo-American, its wake-up call was far more compelling than anything he himself could have written.

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A Medical Doctor and a Novelist // "A Physician Examines His Novels"

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

by Steven Erlanger

Dr. Keilson devoted his life to his patients, many of them Jewish children traumatized by the war and separation from their biological parents, some of whom the Nazis had murdered. He wrote a groundbreaking and widely translated study of “sequential trauma.”

But he wrote novels and poetry too, and it was an extraordinary and puzzling surprise for him, he said, when last month in The New York Times Book Review, Francine Prose, reviewing “The Death of the Adversary” and “Comedy in a Minor Key” — two of his novels written more than 50 years ago — called them masterpieces and labeled him a genius.

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