Fruitful Exactitude
In 1906 G.K. Chesterton summed up the spirit of Dickens’s Christianity as “rowdy benediction”, a phrase that respects both the seriousness and the vitality of Dickens’s “popular religion”. As the twentieth century wound its secular path through war and depression, Dickens’s critics found his religion increasingly unpopular, too easily reduced to conventional piety; so much so that in 1940 George Orwell, card-carrying Dickensian that he was, wrote a substantial essay on Dickens that sidestepped religion altogether. The tide turned dramatically in 1953, when Lionel Trilling read Little Dorrit as a search for ultimate religious truth. Since then, this novel has come into focus as Dickens’s most powerful exploration of Christianity, both socially and existentially.
In Dickens and the Bible, Jennifer Gribble brings specificity to the general topic of Dickens’s religion. Her book is a rigorously text-based study, in which the delight is in the detail, bringing the…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
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6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
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23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
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2 mins