Beethoven Essays

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• At the NYT Opinionator, Stanley Fish explored Ronald Dworkin’s “religious atheism” and what Religion without God can bring to current discussions about ethics.
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October 1: Excavating the Bay of Bengal

The historian Daniel Richter’s Before the Revolution is a centuries-deep excavation of the multiple pasts of the land that became the United States. “Excavation” is Richter’s own term, a metaphor that guides the book and offers a fruitful way of imagining the lineage of a land. “The American Revolution,” he explains, “submerged earlier strata of society, culture, and politics, but those ancient worlds remain beneath the surface to mold the nation’s current contours.” He describes these remaining traces, these temporal palimpsests, as “layered pasts,” the new always a product of the old, which itself must be understood in order to fully know the present. In hi…