NP? modernity, terrorism, truth and relevance? CORRECTED

[Mark Kohut]

Wow....a book by Karen Armstron only available in Pakistan????
 
There is some story there.....
 
Guy wrote DeLillo's Running Dogs theme was, among others, that we watch such things 
as the Boston manhunt because we love motion on TV.....
 
And just started a DeLillo I had not read, End Zone, and speed (of a running back) is a theme...
 
Motion on TV and speed and I cannot help leaping to modernity tropes......
 
 
thanks for other DeLillo tips.... 

________________________________
 From: Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> 
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Monday, April 22, 2013 12:00 PM
Subject: Re: NP? modernity, terrorism, truth and relevance? CORRECTED
  

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions -  Karen Armstrong - 2006 /  

Good book - I read it awhile back and only remember the highlights.  Yes,  Amstrong discusses the term "axial age" problems associated with it. 

I'd be interested to read her newest book,  "A Letter to Pakistan,"  but it's only available in Pakistan.   I wonder what language it's written in and I wonder if it's really available there.  Oxford publishing. 

Bekah


On Apr 21, 2013, at 5:04 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course Armstrong is correct. The excerpt could be misread, so one might think she fails to  attribute the term to Jaspers, but she does. Moreover, she is quite familiar, as she notes in her works, with the uses and controversial uses of the term. 
> 
> On Sunday, April 21, 2013, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
> 
> Armstrong:
> 
> "There was a similar transitional period in the ancient world, lasting roughly from 700 to 200 BCE, which historians have called the Axial Age because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity."
> 
> Not correct. It weren't historians yet the philosopher Karl Jaspers (see Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte) who minted the term Achsenzeit in 1949. And in later years the concept attracted rather social scientists (like Eisenstadt) than historians to whom the concept must appear highly speculative.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_Age
> 
> An actual historian who thought a lot about this kind of concept in order to shed new light on modernity was Reinhart Koselleck who developed the term 'saddle time' (Sattelzeit) for the period between 1750 and 1850. Sounds M&Dish, right? 
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhart_Koselleck 
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sattelzeit
> 
> On 20.04.2013 22:23, alice wellintown wrote:
>> 
>> http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/armstrong-battle.html
>> On Saturday, April 20, 2013, Mark Kohut wrote:
>> " But all of our experience suggests that it is not “fundamentalism” alone but an aching tension between modernity and a false picture of a purer fundamentalist past that makes terrorists."
>>  
>> This is Adam Gopnick in The New Yorker today about the marathon bombers. Does this apply to any of P's characters in AtD?
>> Does this apply to P's vision? Is Hume's condemning what she sees as P's moral failure in Against the Day, refuted, or attempted
>> to be seen (refuted) by P's vision of the cohesion of life in the Olde Europe scenes---the communities of the villages?
>>  
>>  
>> Or, a few have remarked that DeLillo best captured the meanings and understandings of the characters in our recent acts of local terror. True, where?
>> You can answer this question instead.
>>  
>> Extra credit for both.
>> 
>> 
> 
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