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Listening to music, especially live music, can be a religious experience. These days, most of us say that figuratively, but for medieval monks, it was the literal truth. Every aspect of life in a monastery was meant to get you that much closer to God, but especially the times when everyone came together and sang. […]
It gets dark before dinner now in my part of the world, a recipe for seasonal depression. Vincent van Gogh wrote about such low feelings with deep insight. “One feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless.” Yet, when he looked up at […]
The image just above is an animated GIF, a format by now older than most people on the internet. Those of us who were surfing the World Wide Web in its earliest years will remember all those little digging, jackhammering roadworkers who flanked the permanent announcements that various sites — including, quite possibly, our own […]
Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam.… Claims to ancient origin and ultimate authority notwithstanding, the world’s five major religions are all of recent vintage compared to the couple hundred thousand years or more of human existence on the planet. During most of our prehistory, religious beliefs and practices were largely localized, confined to the territorial or […]
At first, film simply recorded events: a man walking across a garden, workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station. The medium soon matured enough to accommodate drama, which for early filmmakers meant simply shooting what amounted to stage productions from the perspective of a viewer in the audience. At that stage, we […]
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Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire during the 4th century CE. The empire fell in the next century as barbarian hordes, such as the Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Huns, Franks, and Alemanni, invaded and conquered parts of their territory. Rome, which was still a flourishing city in 400 CE, lay in tatters […]
These designs appear in Poster Art in Vienna (1923), an introduction to work of Julius Klinger artists and Klinger (22 May 1876 – 1942) himself to an American audience. Klinger work balances intricate detail and negative space, geometric pattern and gestural line, showcasing his control. As befitting a commercial artist, his work conveys a message … Continue reading "Julius Klinger: Poster Art In Vienna, 1923" The post Julius Klinger: Poster Art In Vienna, 1923 appeared first on Flashbak.
Polybius studied Roman history to develop a theory of government that could explain the rise of Rome. He sought to explain how the Roman Republic came to dominate the known world in only 53 years, from the eve of the Second Punic War in 220 BCE to the end of the Third Macedonian War […]
A charming pop-up book about a trip to the moon. Like other pop-up books it is hard to share how wonderful it is to see the rocket rise up or how the surface of the Moon is 3-d. It is a reprint and was was originally Czechoslovakian but I don't know much more about the original book. Kubasta, V. Tip & Top and The Moon Rocket. London: Bancroft and Co. (7 p.) 1964.
When the Neo-Marxist philosopher Jürgen Habermas and Catholic cardinal Joseph Ratzinger debated the place of religion in the public sphere, they agreed that faith and reason can illuminate each other despite their long-standing tension. During this debate Habermas, an atheist, asked secular citizens of liberal democracies to put aside post-metaphysical pre-suppositions to better […]
