Land and sea: In a recent episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Telos journal editor David Pan sits down with John Milbank to discuss his article “A Tale of Two Monsters and Four Elements: Variations of Carl Schmitt and the Current Global Crisis.” Milbank argues that the political thought of Schmitt, a German jurist and prominent Nazi Party member, was split three ways: between a Catholic universalism, a belief in the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state, and a stress upon the primacy of a civilizational landmass—the latter being larger than the state but smaller than the entire planet. Pan and Milbank examine these three idioms, as well as Schmitt’s decisionism and thinking on popular sovereignty during their conversation. Milbank, an English Anglo-Catholic theologian, is a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Nottingham.
Just futures: In many current legal debates, the conversation comes down to one question: what kind of justice should we seek? Should it be retributive, restorative, or a combination thereof? Is the death penalty ever acceptable? With such modern disagreement, many seek to turn back to the wisdom of others like St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote on the use of justice. The Lumen Christi Institute, in conjunction with the St. Thomas More Society at the University of Chicago Law School, will host Father Stephen Brock on Friday, May 5th to discuss these questions. The event will start at 1:30 p.m. with a break and reception after the sessions. Registration is required to receive a PDF of the readings to be done before the discussion.
Spots and stripes: “Art is not ‘about.’ Art is,” begins a review of three discrete art exhibitions by “Color Field” painters Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Larry Poons. This quote, by a friend of Poons, pithily recapitulates art’s resistance against over-intellectualization, a resistance exemplified by the work of the trio. Critic and curator Karen Wilkin describes their oeuvres, which in recent years have largely been overlooked by major institutions, through the shows, which are smattered around Manhattan. Poons is best known for his “dot paintings,” but Yares Art represents him instead with other abstractions, rich, expressive, and far less legible. Noland—shown at Pace Gallery—specialized in stripes, filling a set, schematic composition with vibrating colors. Frankenthaler, just a block from the Noland retrospective at Gagosian, forever changed the course of American abstraction with her so-called “color fields.” Read Wilkin’s review at the link.
The giving forest: Perhaps “sustainability” is just another twenty-first-century neoliberal buzzword. Perhaps not. Cara Buckley writes in The New York Times on the history, practice, and looming collapse of a timber forest managed traditionally by the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin. For 160 years, in the middle of America’s dairyland, members of the tribe have harvested select timber—usually only what’s dying or collapsed—and have not only competed with other major timber farms, but cultivated a forest so lush that its emerald color can be seen from space. But the labor-intensive traditional work, which depends on hand tools over power tools, is having trouble drawing in new generations of tribal members, and the current forest keepers worry that a symbol of environmental stewardship risks running away from its longtime keepers.