Berfrois

The End of the Beginning by Douglas Penick

The End of the Beginning by Douglas Penick

This essay marks the ending of the lavish storehouse of riches known as Berfrois...

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Ed Simon: A Struggle in Edom

Ed Simon: A Struggle in Edom

About a hundred years after that fateful day when the Augustinian monk Martin Luther apocryphally affixed his remonstrance to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, and thus supposedly initiated the Reformation...

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On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

In January the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, suffered a minor scandal concerning the virtue of the Mother of God.

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M. Munro: Ethics and Andrea Long Chu

M. Munro: Ethics and Andrea Long Chu

Andrea Long Chu’s Females is—already—many things to many people, including, as Bryony White notes, “an exercise in logic, not what they were expecting.”..

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Griselda, Top Girls and Rethinking Feminist Subjectivity

Griselda, Top Girls and Rethinking Feminist Subjectivity

Throughout much of my academic life as a feminist medievalist, I regarded Chaucer's Griselda as “patriarchal history’s doormat.”

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Ed Simon: Still Nervous about Harold Bloom

Ed Simon: Still Nervous about Harold Bloom

We come to bury Harold Bloom, not to praise him. The misinterpretations, reactionary poses, and grandiose sentiments too often live after our seemingly once-omnipotent critics pass...

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M. Munro: Making It Explicit

M. Munro: Making It Explicit

One of Kafka’s posthumously published fragments concerns a philosopher whose sole activity, as a philosopher, consists in giving chase to a child’s toy.

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Ed Simon: Breaking the Third Commandment

Ed Simon: Breaking the Third Commandment

What exactly does it mean that the Bible has a story where the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient Creator of the universe gets into a wrestling match...

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Wondering Emma Goldman

Wondering Emma Goldman

Clare Hemmings is one of the most innovative and original voices in contemporary feminist theory. Her work cuts across disciplinary boundaries and is largely concerned with an ongoing and wide-ranging critical reflection on the production of ‘feminist theory’ as a field.

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How to Party Like an Existentialist

How to Party Like an Existentialist

Existentialism has a reputation for being angst-ridden and gloomy mostly because of its emphasis on pondering the meaninglessness of existence, but two of the best-known existentialists knew how to have fun in the face of absurdity.

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Exhausting Concepts

Exhausting Concepts

Despite its philosophical underpinnings, Pascal Chabot’s treatise Global Burnout broadly overlaps with Petersen’s article: ‘Burnout is a disease of civilization’...

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Ed Simon: On Death and Not Dying

Ed Simon: On Death and Not Dying

At the eastern edge of the city of Pittsburgh, where neighborhoods lined with red and pin oak, birch and elm start to merge into the forested thicket...

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Keith Doubt: Is Ratko Mladić miserable?

Keith Doubt: Is Ratko Mladić miserable?

When, according to Socrates, was Mladić more miserable? When he committed genocide and over a long period of time was not arrested, convicted, or punished..

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To Differ

To Differ

What remains for us now of Hegel, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and the "philosophy of difference"? In the 1980s, as more and more works by Derrida and Deleuze were translated into English

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Art, documentary and the essay film

Art, documentary and the essay film

The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’...

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For the Sake of Dreams

For the Sake of Dreams

If existentialism did have an influence on popular social movements, how would we know? An even bigger question looms. What counts as an idea?

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Ed Simon: D-Day 75 Years Later

Ed Simon: D-Day 75 Years Later

Seventy-five years ago, and more than 150,000 men would land on the Normandy coast, arriving on very French beaches assigned the very American names of Utah and Omaha

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Sans Edits

Sans Edits

Trying to get a point across in public writing, whether established or clickbait media, with just the nuance, force, and connotations you intend, is like trying to perform a violin solo underwater...

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