Wracking it Up TRTR, Pt2 C2 p352ff......Partisan Review

[Mark Kohut]

p.352..."a small stiff-backed magazine---A symposium on religion! he read from the cover." 
 
Almost surely this is an allusion to a mid-1950 [April--June 1950, I believe]  issue of The Partisan Review. It is semi-famous. 
I, as lame as some of the characters in TR, have had a copy, bought from the street tables of The Strand decades later. 
(Like the lame characters in TR, I liked to waste time with old literary magazines....I should be--have been---
ashamed, smile, but now I can post this knowledge here.....)
 
Below is a much later summary w tidbits about that symposium. It had many of the most famous intellectuals in America, inlcuding
art critic Clement Greenburg, so into defining the 'necessary genius' of the abstract expressionists,most famously and
where Art should go...the kind of critic who COULD review a work before it was published as in this chapter...(I do
not mean to suggest moral failure in Greenburg, know little, but want to suggest he knew the ART world pre-emptively, so
to speak)
 
Google it and you will see. Current intellectuals still talking about it, good piece in 2009, it seems.
 
 
Gaddis might agree with this? (about shallowness) and Recognition shows up once again: 
"In the 1950s, Partisan Review had a symposium on "Religion and the Intellectuals," and most contributors saw through the shallowness of the religiosity that would mark the Eisenhower years. Religion is secular rather than spiritual, lacking passion and conviction. Will Herberg wrote Protestant-Catholic-Jew to demonstrate that religion in America is a sociological phenomenon with each denomination affording people their identity in a mass society. It could also be used by politicians who scarcely knew whereof they spoke. "Recognition of the Supreme Being," declared President Eisenhower in 1955, "is the first, most basic expression of Americanism. Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life." 
-------Political/cultural historian named Diggins (if I haven't mixed this up from copy to paste.), I believe, google and confirm if it matters, who wrote a
good book on American Liberalism...........
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