Wednesday, August 18, 2004

matters of doubt and faith

The Elegrant Variation has a guest review by Michael Patrick Hughes of Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: A History. Hecht's book traces the flip side of belief in western and eastern religion. Quoting Hecht:

“Great believers and great doubters seem like opposites, but they are more similar to each other than to the mass of relatively disinterested or acquiescent men and women.”

The EV also links to the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier 's 1983 review of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz's The Witness of Poetry, based on Harvard lectures that the poet gave.
The Witness of Poetry, the text of his Norton Lectures, is the credo of a great poet. It reveals that Milosz is really a religious thinker. His religiousness is not "tacit," as a critic recently claimed; it is explicit, as it has been in his poems for many years.

Milosz died this past week.

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