For those who have not visited VoegelinView this week:

A tree is not a tree to the Roman poet--
Glenn Hughes brings us a Shakespearean metamorphosis of Ovid's Daphne and
Apollo, in which we are compelled to see the crystaline images cloaked in
archaic spellings and left to ponder the possibility or impossibility of saving
one's chastity at any cost.

Michael Jackson's Death—A case in Point--
Brendan Purcell in Socrates and the Media, Part 2, describes the interplay of
the media with its enabling audience. In Part 1 it was Princess Diana's death
and in this first week of July, 2009, the media obsession and the near hysteria
is repeated with the death of the "King of Pop."

We are supposed to be comforted by "Progress," but. . . .
"An infinite process of perfection is synonymous with an absolute standstill for
any finite intuition" writes Eric Voegelin in this week's quotation from The
History of the Race Idea. "[The Nazi annexation of Austria] is the reason why
this book, which I consider one of my better efforts, has remained practically
unknown, though it would be of considerable help in the contemporary, rather
dilettantic, debates between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists."

Nietzsche as the first postmodern deconstructionist--
And James M. Rhodes finds at the root a defiance of God—in Part 4 of Modern
Views of Plato's Silence.