Project MUSE®: Common Knowledge - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Common Knowledge.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 8 (2002) through current issueLatest Articles: Common KnowledgeTWOProject MUSE®Common Knowledge1538-45780961-754XLatest articles in Common Knowledge. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Climate Crisis As A Challenge To Democracy: Are Citizen Assemblies the Answer?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973551
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For what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in formation of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with common-sense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly, and free communication?Je ne veux pas dire que parce que les 150 citoyens ont écrit un truc, c'est la Bible ou le Coran. [I do not want to say that because 150 citizens have written a thing, that that's the Bible or the Koran.]From day to day, democracies are about neither consensus nor cohesion. They are about conflict—not just any
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallThe Climate Crisis As A Challenge To Democracy: Are Citizen Assemblies the Answer?2025-11-06text/htmlen-USThe Climate Crisis As A Challenge To Democracy: Are Citizen Assemblies the Answer?2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®877192026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06Converting and Mixing: A View from the Sideline
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973552
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In The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain, Benzion Netanyahu concluded in 1995 that most of the Jews who converted to Christianity in Renaissance Spain did so fully and genuinely.1 Their persecution by the Inquisition, as a result, was an early form of anti-Semitism. Taking the opposite view, Henry Kamen argued in 1998 that the activities of the Inquisition were motivated by sincere religious anxieties and, indeed, by repeating evidence that many converts continued to practice their former religion.2 The Inquisition, therefore, did not act out of prejudice but was responding to a genuine religious conundrum.Although this disagreement was politically charged and heatedly debated, the two sides
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallConverting and Mixing: A View from the Sideline2025-11-06text/htmlen-USConverting and Mixing: A View from the Sideline2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®1334462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06Toward a Symposium on Conversion: A Call for Papers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973553
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In the preceding essay, "Converting and Mixing," Tamar Herzog catalogs the preposterous consequences of Muslim conversions to Christianity, during and after the Reconquista, and of Jewish conversions, during and after the persecutions and massacres of Iberian Jews in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Among the many questions that Herzog's account raises is why a people, the Iberian Christians, who had demanded that their neighbors convert en masse would then refuse to grant them recognition of their identity as Christians. The con-versos' blood was found to be "impure," but Christianity (unlike Judaism) is not passed genetically. Those who would be Christians, according to Saint Paul, are baptized so "that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallToward a Symposium on Conversion: A Call for Papers2025-11-06text/htmlen-USToward a Symposium on Conversion: A Call for Papers2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®274342026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06Renunciation and Embrace: The Dialectic of Christian Asceticism from Late Antiquity to the Present
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973554
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The study of Christian asceticism falls remarkably short of providing an accurate representation of the phenomenon. Scholarship in this field is limited in several ways that need rectifying. While there are excellent studies, for example, of late antique and medieval asceticism,1 comparable works on the modern and postmodern periods are scarce. Furthermore, there appear to be no works at all that attempt a coherent narrative of Christian asceticism from late antiquity to the present. Topically, studies have focused almost exclusively on the renunciation of sex. This focus is only now beginning to change, with scholars such as Béatrice Caseau, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, and Inbar Graiver expanding the study of askēsis
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallRenunciation and Embrace: The Dialectic of Christian Asceticism from Late Antiquity to the Present2025-11-06text/htmlen-USRenunciation and Embrace: The Dialectic of Christian Asceticism from Late Antiquity to the Present2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®1095542026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06Asceticism in Human Evolution
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973555
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"Raw dogging" is the latest craze in the long history of asceticism. It is a practice by which airplane passengers refrain from any form of entertainment during their flight. They avoid using their mobile phone or any other gadget. Overachievers also renounce drinking water and consuming food,1 and the most perfectionist among them neither visit the lavatory nor recline their seats. Coping with a long flight without any diversion is a form of asceticism among young, well-to-do, white, male Westerners in the third decade of this century. The trend developed when a Norwegian football star, Erling Braut Haaland of Manchester City, shared with his audience on TikTok his experience of a seven-hour plane trip and became
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallAsceticism in Human Evolution2025-11-06text/htmlen-USAsceticism in Human Evolution2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®967282026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06Swole Asceticism: Training the Body to Transcend Social Expectations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973556
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Casey Johnston is a meathead who demonstrates a tantalizing form of bodily discipline: training the female body to take up more space. A journalist and lifting guru, Johnston made her reputation by explaining the basics of weightlifting to New York Magazine readers in the 2010s. She now dispenses advice to potential lifters through social media and her own workout program under the brands "Swole Woman" and "She's a Beast." What differentiates Johnston from many other trainers and exercise educators is that she displays her body as someone who wants to lift a lot of weight without trying to have low body fat. In the world of lifting, her style is akin to "power lifting," which is a sport judged not by how much
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallSwole Asceticism: Training the Body to Transcend Social Expectations2025-11-06text/htmlen-USSwole Asceticism: Training the Body to Transcend Social Expectations2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®350812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06Worrying Farquhar's Scholarship about Hinduism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973557
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Farquhar (1861–1929) was a missionary scholar who spent more than thirty years in India, as student secretary and then literary secretary of the YMCA India. He traveled widely for the sake of learning about lived Hinduism and was a popular lecturer in Christian circles. He believed that knowledge of Hinduism was necessary for a proper preaching of the Gospel. Among his well-known and influential books are Permanent Lessons of the Gita (1903), Gita and Gospel (1906), The Approach of Christ to Modern India (1913), A Primer of Hinduism (1914), Modern Religious Movements in India (1915), An Outline of the Religious Literature of India (1920), and, most famously, The Crown of Hinduism (1913), the topic of this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallWorrying Farquhar's Scholarship about Hinduism2025-11-06text/htmlen-USWorrying Farquhar's Scholarship about Hinduism2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®132962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06Hugo van der Goes: Between Pain and Bliss ed. by Erik Eising and Stephan Kemperdick (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973558
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Hugo van der Goes's Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin resonates with me now more than it once did. The saint in the painting looks uncomfortable. He kneels on a cushion as he draws with a fine silver point, but the stiffness of his right leg suggests he has been on his knees too long. Strewn on the floor before him are a piece of charcoal, a knife for sharpening it, and a bird's wing for erasing. Saint Luke used these tools to make his preliminary sketch before he began to fix the Virgin's likeness in silver. The wing's tip, dusty from erasures, is black. Focus and strain, Hugo reminds us, are both part of professional experience.Hugo's own struggles were more of the mind than the body. So claimed a monk named Gaspar
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallHugo van der Goes: Between Pain and Bliss ed. by Erik Eising and Stephan Kemperdick (review)2025-11-06text/htmlen-USHugo van der Goes: Between Pain and Bliss ed. by Erik Eising and Stephan Kemperdick (review)2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®84662026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06God's Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very by Clark Davis (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973559
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Of all the literati who swam in and out of Ralph Waldo Emerson's orbit, none displays more strikingly Romanticism's fusion of poetry with visionary mysticism than Jones Very (1813–1880). Although most of his eight-hundred-odd poems were humdrum lyrics and commemorative pieces, during an eruption of religio-poetic inspiration in his midtwenties, Very turned out scores of remarkable Shakespearean sonnets—always his preferred genre—in which the speaker assumes the voice of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the prelapsarian Adam, the paradigmatic saved soul. The best of these rival the best in the mystical canon from Hildegard von Bingen to Henry Vaughan to Blake, Hopkins, Yeats, and Ginsberg. Prior mastery of the sonnet
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallGod's Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very by Clark Davis (review)2025-11-06text/htmlen-USGod's Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very by Clark Davis (review)2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®47972026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre by Marcia Noe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973560
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The story of bohemian life and avant-garde culture in Chicago and New York in the second decade of the twentieth century has by now been told many times. It seems to hold the same fascination for readers and writers as that of the English Romantic poets a century earlier. I have watched the growing attention given to the so-called Chicago renaissance and to the Greenwich Village of the 1910s since 1958–59, when I was the first person to go through Floyd Dell's papers at the Newberry Library and wrote, as my dissertation, a critical biography of him. Dell, primarily known as a novelist and a literary and social critic, was in many ways the central figure both in Chicago (1909–1913) and then in the Village
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallThree Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre by Marcia Noe (review)2025-11-06text/htmlen-USThree Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre by Marcia Noe (review)2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®51522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973561
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The Playbook delves into the turbulent life of the Federal Theater Project (FTP), a New Deal experiment launched in 1935 to bring theater to the masses, only to be crushed by the government four years later. Shapiro recounts the FTP's audacious productions, from Orson Welles's "Voodoo" Macbeth, set after the Haitian Revolution, to One Third of a Nation, an exposé of urban housing that blended newsreel and agitprop styles. Alongside such experimental, often leftist works, the FTP also served up more conventional fare—think Lincoln biographies and classic plays—and provided employment for thousands of theater workers struggling to survive the Depression.The book's real drama, though—and where Shapiro's narrative
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallThe Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro (review)2025-11-06text/htmlen-USThe Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro (review)2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®41762026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California by Andrew Garrett (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973562
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This impressive book reveals the ferocity with which a present generation can bring charges against those of a past generation alleged to have committed errors. Alfred Kroeber, one of the most eminent and productive anthropologists of the twentieth century, had a building on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley named after him in 1961, just one year after his death, at age eighty-four. Sixty years later, the building was divested of his name, and Kroeber's reputation has thereby been damaged. An anonymous campus organization had accused him of a variety of activities hostile to the Indigenous people of California, and the charges themselves were quickly served up as the guilty verdict. The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallThe Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California by Andrew Garrett (review)2025-11-06text/htmlen-USThe Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California by Andrew Garrett (review)2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®91902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06Transit of Rose
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973563
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She was lying in the bed: had been lying there for some time, had indeed lost track of time, just lying there observing the progress of shadows across the wall, up the wall actually and then across the ceiling; watching the way the sheer white curtain, lifted every now and then by a sneaking finger of breeze, exposed brief glimpses of outside. Since she, narcotized, lacked the will to look at the clock (though she could hear it, very close by: its relentless accusatory ticking), the room for her with its very white walls and very sharp corners, its terrain of familiar landmarks—the mirror; the walnut bureau, on which lay scattered the hairbrush in which a dark twist of hair was caught, the little yellow jewelry box
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallTransit of Rose2025-11-06text/htmlen-USTransit of Rose2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®259962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/973564
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Lori Baker is the author of The Glass Ocean, a novel about which John Banville wrote that "her prose has the flash and fire of molten glass." Her story collections include Crash and Tell; Scraps; and Crazy Water: Six Fictions, which early in her career received the Bobst Prize for Emerging Fiction. She is one of the three-member steering committee for the International Writers Project at Brown University.Marisa Anne Bass, professor of the history of art at Yale University, is the author of The Monument's End: Public Art and the Modern Republic; Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt; and Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity. She coauthored Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/32/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2025-11-06text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2025-11-062025TWOProject MUSE®83902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-11-06