| |  | | What we've been up to |  | From the new issue's theme: It is perhaps tempting to think that digital technologies are just tools—like a shovel or a printing press. We use them to get things done, to amuse ourselves, or to do any number of other things. But as Antón Barba-Kay, philosopher and humanities chair at Deep Springs College, argues in "Enchantments of the One and Zero Mirror," digital technology has taken on characteristics that no longer make it analogous to conventional tools. We have "ceased to see ourselves without it," Barba-Kay writes, and "we have lost our minds to it" to such a degree that it has become the new ground for "our conception of our ultimate, transcendent purposes."
"Digital technology…now bears the full weight of our yearning for integration, participation, and incorporation in a larger purpose than our own…. It is our means for feeling as if we may escape the curse of being alone, unseen, forgotten, and misunderstood. It is our most powerful collective metaphor for communication, commerce, and communion: the Pentecost in which all people speak their own language and find themselves heard. It is our central way, in this sense, of aspiring to make contact, of imagining ourselves as part of what is whole and universal, of being in touch with being in love. We reach out in light of it and bend our meanings toward that light, screened off from you, light from light unreckoned." | |  | From the new issue's "Signifiers" column: At some point in the last decade or so, transparent came to be seen as a cultural and political ideal. As historian Wilfred McClay writes, the term suggests values of openness and honesty. But transparency is a tricky thing—the more you look through things, the less you eventually see. And as it is promiscuously used today, this supposed ideal is often used to conceal or avoid what is actually important.
"Being transparent is a phony-baloney ideal, just the kind of ideal a therapeutic society is likely to embrace in theory and find itself unable to carry out in practice. Every shared human enterprise—friendships, marriages, families, churches, business partnerships, and above all, positions of leadership—involves a blend of opacity and transparency, a balance of revelation and privacy, of intimacy and distance. The best human relationships require unstated but inviolable boundaries. There should not be too many of them. But there should be a sufficient number to guard against the desire for complete transparency, which becomes a form of interpersonal imperialism. Although André Malraux was wrong to say that 'Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides,' he was not entirely wrong. Malraux would have come closer to the truth if he had said that we are always, in part, made up of that which others do not see." | |  | New Web Feature: Secularization theories have got the literary form of the novel wrong—or at least partly wrong. So argues Richard Hughes Gibson, professor of English at Wheaton College, in "In Through the Out Door," a new installment of our web series "Critical Miniatures." The novel has no "official theological stance," Gibson argues. And just as it might undermine or banish the divine, it might also test characters and readers with the return of an abandoned god.
"In his Theory of the Novel (1916), Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács famously declared that 'The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.' Lukács wasn't sure that the 'godforsaken' novel would have the last word on the state of the world, mind you, but the expression soon took on a life of its own, becoming a tagline for the secular theory of the novel. In brief, critics of this persuasion see the novel tradition as both evidence of the growing secularization of Western culture and a potent force in that process."
Read earlier installments of "Critical Miniatures" at HedgehogReview.com: | |  | | | | Each week, we make new essays from the latest issue freely available to the public. We love to share our work—and we make much of our content freely available to readers outside the paywall, in our online Web Features, in podcasts and live events—but we can't do it without help from our readers.
Please make a donation to The Hedgehog Review so that we can continue to do our vital work. | | | | |  | From the archives: When the American dream is denied—when expectations of brighter opportunities or a better life are not met—feelings of bitterness and hurt tend to come on with a vengeance. And, as Angel Adams Parham wrote for the spring 2022 issue, it "sometimes even leads the unrequited dreamer to violence." This experience of hopes dashed, common to generations of African-Americans, has been largely unfamiliar to most white Americans. That is, until relatively recently. As Parham, associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and senior fellow at the Institute, argued in "A Tale of Two Stories," the black experience under Jim Crow is instructive if we want to find another way besides the way of anger.
"While such injustice can understandably lead to prolonged bitterness and anger, black Americans have more profitably translated their hurt and anger into powerful art and constructive protest. From the roots of their pathos have sprung great music, art, dance, and literature that are known and emulated around the world. And out of their suffering, they have founded political movements that push all Americans to live up to their nation's highest ideals." | | | |  | | | | | | | | | | Copyright (C) 2023 The Hedgehog Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Update Preferences | Unsubscribe  |
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Keep a civil tongue.