Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation”

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Flannery O’Connor was a remarkable 20th-century American writer of startling, strange, and sometimes violent short stories and novels set in the rural South. In the last year of her too-short life, she worked between medical treatments and hospitalization, writing and correcting the last draft of “Revelation,” one of her final short stories. It remains a well-crafted masterpiece, the culmination of all she intended to say about the fallen human condition and the power of grace to pierce through the veil and open your eyes to yourself and those around you.

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Henry Ossawa Tanner and Gateway, Tangier

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As the age-old adage goes, “Every painter paints himself.” Countless artists including Michelangelo, Raphael, Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, Marc Chagall, Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, and even Lucien Freud have revealed as much. If painters paint themselves, then paintings say something of real consequence about their biographies.

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Where to Begin: Thoughts on a Publication Going Forward

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My goals as Editor-in-Chief of the Alexander Hamilton Institute’s student-run publication Enquiry are to nurture student authors and to publish exceptional writing on political, economic, and cultural issues from differing voices. I want staff writers and guest writers from “paleo to progressive” to describe the world from a perspective that is uncommon, significant, well reasoned, and profound. Their power will come from their ability to look at important issues cogently and dispassionately, relying not only on current modes of thinking, but also on their unique views. At Enquiry, as our mission statement attests, “you will find no shouting matches, no sloganeering. The goal is to elevate the discussion, not to end it. Here, no debates are over and settled, and no ideas are safe from criticism.” We take all who want to enter the realm of ideas and conversation as welcome guests. 

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“Americana a Roma”

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How do words find parallels in images? Where do art, architecture, history, and beauty intersect? Rome provides its own ethereal and persuasive response. Rome is the natural habitat of artisans, ancient works of civilization, Latinists, philosophers, saints, architectural edifices, political revolution, and Italian madness, creativity, and mirth. The folly of human life encounters the divine in this city. It is where ancient culture merges with contemporary life and becomes a harmonious chaos. Rome is the archetype, the original.


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Reflection on Sophocles and Flannery O’Connor

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Sophocles was born just outside of Athens in 496 BC to a well-to-do family and lived to be 90 years old. He wrote more than one hundred plays, of which only seven in complete form have survived: Ajax, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. He was a contemporary of another great playwright, Euripides, and wrote most of his plays after those of Aeschylus.

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On The New Curator

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A London publisher, Laurence King, observed: “How many times have you heard the term ‘curate’ in the past few years? But what exactly does it mean? Curating has been a key concept both in and outside the art world in the past few years, with the role of a curator having changed and expanded with each new exhibition or biennale.”

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