touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
But it may be that the truly "modern" thing about the modern age, the nineteenth century and the twentieth, its really diagnostic train, is the interest in beginnings, in origin, in aetiology: when we try to say what something is—witness Darwin, for example, and Freud—our way of doing it is to go back and talk about how it got to be the way it looks now. Or it might be said that with the eroding away of the assumptions of the first chapters of Genesis, other mythology had to be supplied, mythology in the fashionable scientific language, if only in order to fill up what began to appear as the dark backward and abysm of time.
—Howard Nemerov
from the Introduction to Poetic Diction by Owen Barfield (1928)
— Nature — Commonplaces #31 — Nov/Dec 2019 —
Touchstone is a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox.
The mission of the journal and its publisher, The Fellowship of St. James, is to provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.
The Fellowship of St. James is a 501(c)(3) non-denominational, non-partisan, organization that receives no government funding. All gifts are tax-deductible.
All content © The Fellowship of St. James — 2024. All rights reserved.
Returns, refunds, and privacy policy.