Culture
How Is the Talmud Structured? A Reader's Primer
The Mishnah, the Gemara, six orders, two versions, and a page layout unchanged since a sixteenth-century Venice printer — plus where to start reading it, free, in translation.
Section
Culture
Coverage of religion inside cultural life: sacred imagery in painting and film, liturgical music, festivals and holidays as public occasions, and the arguments belief provokes in civic debate. Historically informed and non-partisan. For readers interested in how faith shapes what a society makes and celebrates.
Where belief meets culture: religious imagery in film and painting, sacred music, holidays as public events, and the arguments faith stirs in civic life.
Culture
Why the Hindu Epics Keep Being Retold
The Mahabharata and the Ramayana present themselves as already retold, which is why every era from Kamban to the present adds its own telling instead of replacing one.
Culture
How to Read a Gothic Cathedral
Plan, glass, portal and labyrinth: a Gothic cathedral is a building that can be followed like an argument, once you know where the sentences are.
Culture
Why Islamic Calligraphy Became Sacred Art
Where the revelation was a book, the highest visual honor fell not on the image but on the letter — measured, gilded, and trained into a discipline that still awards licenses today.
Culture
How Monasteries Saved Books
Between the fall of Rome and the rise of the universities, the survival of Latin literature narrowed to a few copying chains — and monastic scriptoria were the strongest of them.
Culture
How to Read “The Grand Inquisitor”
Ivan Karamazov's poem about bread, miracle, authority and one silent kiss is the strongest argument in the novel, and Dostoevsky wrote it for the side he was arguing against.
Culture
A Short History of Gospel Music
From Isaac Watts's hymnbook to Mahalia Jackson's millions, the story of gospel is the story of one repertoire repeatedly crossing lines it was never meant to cross.
Culture
The Book of Common Prayer's Literary Afterlife
Cranmer's 1549 prayer book was written to vanish into the mouths of congregations, and that anonymity is exactly why its sentences still turn up in novels, wedding scenes and pop songs.
Culture
Why Illuminated Manuscripts Still Matter
Every medieval book is an animal skin that survived fire, rain, war and reuse, which is why the ones that remain are unlike any other objects in the history of reading.
Culture
A Listener's Guide to Bach's Passions
The St John and St Matthew Passions are two hours of theology built from narration, hymn tunes and one unanswered question, and they can be followed from the first chorus with a little preparation.