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"Garry Wills"
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Outside looking in : adventures of an observer
Prolific journalist, historian, political columnist, and practicing Catholic Wills (now 76) writes an intensely opinionated re-evaluation of leaders and celebrities he has encountered, among them Studs Terkel, Beverly Sills, William Buckley, Richard Nixon, and more.
Book
The Good, the Bad, and the Dead
This article is a thought exercise concerning the following observation: many societies define the good by means of the bad and often organize, wittingly or not, methods of destruction to instantiate the good. Such methods, sometimes dressed up as sacrifice, at other times as scapegoating, and still other times as the experience of necessity, always lead to a hierarchy. Whatever the means, destruction helps to organize social systems throughout the world. The article uses well-known models to develop an understanding of these processes. Beginning with the role of sacrifice in the Kula, the analysis touches on lynching in the United States and then, utilizing underplayed facts in Dumont’s discussion of India, moves to defense spending in contemporary culture. So why is destruction a form of accumulation, the generator of sociality?
Journal Article
The melancholy art
Melancholy is not only about sadness, despair, and loss. As Renaissance artists and philosophers acknowledged long ago, it can engender a certain kind of creativity born from a deep awareness of the mutability of life and the inevitable cycle of birth and death. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the intellectual history of the history of art,The Melancholy Artexplores the unique connections between melancholy and the art historian's craft.
Though the objects art historians study are materially present in our world, the worlds from which they come are forever lost to time. In this eloquent and inspiring book, Michael Ann Holly traces how this disjunction courses through the history of art and shows how it can give rise to melancholic sentiments in historians who write about art. She confronts pivotal and vexing questions in her discipline: Why do art historians write in the first place? What kinds of psychic exchanges occur between art objects and those who write about them? What institutional and personal needs does art history serve? What is lost in historical writing about art?
The Melancholy Artlooks at how melancholy suffuses the work of some of the twentieth century's most powerful and poetic writers on the history of art, including Alois Riegl, Franz Wickhoff, Adrian Stokes, Michael Baxandall, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida. A disarmingly personal meditation by one of our most distinguished art historians, this book explains why to write about art is to share in a kind of intertwined pleasure and loss that is the very essence of melancholy.
eBook
The power of rhetoric and the rhetoric of power: Exploring a tension within the Obama presidency
When Barack Obama acceded to the Presidency of the United States he held out the promise of a new beginning. As a master of political rhetoric he had spoken of a new start following the dismal years of the Bush administration. He would take America back to its inspirational creed of freedom and democracy. He augured a break with policies infringing on civil liberties and government under the law. Once in office, though, the power of rhetoric that had carried him into the White House ran into the hard reality of political rule under conditions of ongoing wars in far-away countries and the threat of terrorism, lurking at home and abroad. This chapter will explore how well President Obama managed to preserve democratic freedoms at home while fighting terrorism.
Journal Article
'What Paul Meant' by Garry Wills, a bold appraisal of the apostle
\"The best way to find out what Jesus meant to his early followers is to see what [Paul] meant to his fellow believers, many of whom had seen Jesus,\" [Garry Wills] states. \"His letters stand closer to Jesus than do any other words in the New Testament.\" \"What Paul Meant\" is especially hard on the Book of Acts, a narrative of Paul's travels. Wills flatly contradicts the purported author, Luke, on several counts. He also notes that Luke doesn't cite any of Paul's letters, and says that some of Luke's anecdotes contradict each other. In a long examination of the book of Romans -- which he calls Paul's most comprehensive statement of belief -- Wills attacks the \"dark views\" of election, justification and predestination that Protestants draw from that letter. Wills argues that it actually proclaims salvation en masse, rescuing nations instead of individuals.
Newsletter
Rite of history
\"The Future of the Catholic Church With Pope Francis,\" Garry Wills' new book, isn't really about Pope Francis, though that surprising man from Argentina figures in the story, nor is it a book about the future of the Catholic Church. But once you get past that rather misleading title, there's no ambiguity about Wills' purpose. He makes it clear on the first page of his introduction, which is subtitled \"Reading History Forward.\"
Newspaper Article
Pleasanton: Bestselling author to discuss Catholicism's future, Pope Francis
\"The Pope has done more to be open to Muslims: In (the document) he's said the Koran is something we can learn from. That's tremendously important, perhaps the most important thing he's done to tamp the move by some for a Holy War.\"If you GO New York Times multiple-bestselling author [Garry Wills] will discuss his latest book, \"The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope [Francis].\" He will speak and read excerpts, do a question-and-answer session and sign books. WHEN: Noon Wednesday WHERE: Firehouse Arts Center Theater in Pleasanton. COST: Tickets are $10 online at www.firehousearts.org or in person at the Firehouse box office. Tickets will also be available at the door if not sold out. INFO: 925-931-4848. NOTE: Books will be available to purchase at the event, courtesy of Towne Center Books. \"God is not gender,\" \"Catholicism should be ecumenical\" and \"Gay relationships seem quite natural to me,\" Wills has written or said in books or interviews. Never inflammatory without solid scholasticism to back up his stance, the essays collected in his new book \"read history forward.\"
Newspaper Article
'Why I am Catholic' enlightening for all
Vatican II for [Garry Wills] was \"the great rebirth.\" It produced major breakthroughs in understanding the place of the laity; in the use of Scripture and the nature of liturgy; in asserting the dignity of conscience; in articulating the relationship of the Catholic Church to other religions; in updating the understanding of church-state relations; and in expanding the teaching authority of the whole church, including pope, bishops, priests and laity. Wills judges these breakthroughs to constitute \"fundamental reorientation,\" subsequently thwarted by Popes Paul VI and John Paul II. His theological section on the meaning of the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer is perhaps the least impressive section of the book. As a public intellectual, Wills is more the trained classicist and historian, less the theologian. He begins the book with this declaration: \"I am not a Catholic because of the pope. I am a Catholic because of the creed. I believe in that, and it does not mention the pope.\" Wills ends with this G.K. [Gilbert K. Chesterton] comment: \"A man does not come an inch nearer to being a heretic by being a hundred times a critic. ... He only becomes a heretic at the precise moment when he prefers his criticism to his Catholicism.\"
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