“To Help Man Endure by Lifting His Heart”: Earl Hamner at 100
By James E. Person Jr. “My grandfather used to say that nobody owns a mountain, but getting born and living and dying in its shadow, we loved Waltons’ Mountain and felt it was ours.” Spoken in the gentle, Southern/Scotch-Irish accent typical of rural Virginia, those...
Unlikely Centers of Cultural Change
Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World, 1650-1789 by E. Wesley Reynolds III. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Cloth, 264 pages, $115.00. Reviewed by James E. Person Jr. Near the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson famously referred to coffee as “the favorite drink of the...
Bradbury in the Afternoon
Bradbury Beyond Apollo by Jonathan R. Eller. University of Illinois Press, 2020. Hardcover, 336 pages. $35. Reviewed by James E. Person Jr. Anyone who considers the life and career of Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) is eventually struck by a remarkable fact: although the...
‘The Real World Is the World of the Permanent Things’
Bradbury at 100 James E. Person Jr. Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was born one hundred years ago today, August 22. Bradbury was the author of numerous novels and stories beloved by several generations of readers worldwide, notably The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated...
"Haven’s book is an engaging introduction to Girard. Reading through its presentation of the components and explanatory power of mimetic theory, it becomes clear Americans have arrived at a time for a very different kind of choosing."
"Knowing the truth about scapegoating does not mean it has been abandoned. Indeed, while people have become increasingly good at seeing the scapegoats of others as just that, scapegoats, they remain convinced their enemies really are evil."