Category: Summer Reading Series

We live, many say, in an age of mass distraction — but distraction has long been with us. In Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention, Cal English professor David Marno considers how the Renaissance poetry of John Donne offered a model for battling distraction and for inviting a state of open attentiveness that was allied with grace. Asking why Christian prayer requires attention...

Professor D.A. Miller’s most recent book Hidden Hitchcock (University of Chicago Press, 2016) asks the reader to consider how Alfred Hitchcock works on two registers at once: as one of the most inviting filmmakers of our time, and as one of the most oblique. Miller argues that while the filmmaker’s “public style” has made him a favorite of audiences around the world,...

The fable of the tar baby is one that spans both centuries and continents; as far back as the late 1800’s and across Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia, you can find the simple tale of a fox ensnaring a rabbit using a life-like figurine made of tar as punishment for stealing the former’s crops.  This is more than a folk...