Jay Parini Quotes
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Whether we're looking at the burial box of St. James, a fragment of the True Cross, the Shroud of Turin, or some bones supposedly belonging to John the Baptist, there is always excitement and distrust, faith and doubt.
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A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because 'Possession' is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.
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I still have deep respect for the evangelical tradition and feel, in many ways, close to the Baptist roots of my childhood, although I've been an Episcopalian throughout my adult life and a regular churchgoer.
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The idea that owning a gun in America was an individual right only dates to the 1980s.
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The most dazzling aspect of 'Possession' is Ms. Byatt's canny invention of letters, poems and diaries from the 19th century.
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In truth, Jesus did not, in his own time, attract much notice.
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As with all great works of literature, 'Of Mice and Men' moves with the inexorability of a huge river, and it pours itself, exhausts itself, in the sea of our unconscious. Having read it, we carry the book inside us forever.
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My own grandparents came to the United States as immigrants in 1912, and they lived for some years in Italian ghettos in New York. Most immigrant groups start in ghettos somewhere, and many of them never get out.
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Although the story of George and Lennie in 'Of Mice and Men' ends on a depressing note, there is a peculiar aura of human dignity in it, a hint of redemption.
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I say that a myth is a story which has particular energy, mythic resonance. I always say that a myth is a tear in the fabric of reality through which all of this spiritual energy pours.
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In a sense, I wrote the book about Jesus that I wanted to read.
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I have always found the baptism of Jesus, with a dove descending and voice from Heaven, one of the great moments in the Jesus story. This is where Jesus hears the deep call from God.
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American politicians who dwell on American exceptionalism only dishonor us by suggesting we play dumb to our past.
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Fundamentalism takes different forms in different religions, but there is one striking similarity in all forms of fundamentalist thought. Each wishes dearly to hold in check all varieties of 'modern' or 'decadent' thinking.
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Beginning in the late 18th century, some German scholars began to regard Holy Scripture not as a single revelation but a sequence of inspired texts that occurred in specific times and places and were subject to varied and multiple meanings.
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There's been an unquestionable decline in American culture. The education system is thin on the ground. People don't read as deeply and at length as they used to. And the media has been scattered into so many cable channels.
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My earliest memories of holidays are from when I was about eight. We lived in Pennsylvania, and every year we'd visit Miami.
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The United States is truly remarkable, a nation founded on a set of Enlightenment ideals so beautifully expressed by the Declaration of Independence and codified in the U.S. Constitution. We should feel good about our ideals, even when we don't quite manage to live up to them.
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Indeed, we might all forget where we have been if we didn't have somebody to assemble and arrange the little blocks called facts from which history is constructed, artfully or less so.
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When Gore Vidal was coming up, there were three major channels, and he could count on a big audience when he debated someone like William F. Buckley on TV.
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One of the first courses I ever taught at Dartmouth was on the Bible as literature.
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Honest, simple work for young people is essential to their well-being.
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The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.
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Who was Jesus anyway? After twenty centuries, there is not much anyone can agree on. The four canonical gospels don't measure up to modern standards of biographical writing, and - outside of this material - there is precious little contemporary evidence, apart from a few glancing mentions of Jesus or the movement centered on him.