Footnotes to my article on Dances of Universal Peace

In writing today’s story about Dances of Universal Peace, and how it seems to be an interesting counterexample to a historic trend in which art and religion have parted ways during most of the 20th century, I did some research.

I found this article by the sometimes controversial feminist writer Camille Paglia (she wrote the Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson). The 2007 article published in Arion, a journal of the arts from Boston University, is actually a transcript of a speech she gave in 2003. You can read the article in pdf format here.

I also came across John Patrick Diggins’ review of The Secular Age by Charles Taylor. It has nothing to say about the rocky marriage of art and religion but does address the role of spirituality in public life, something that has become unfashionable for liberals to talk about since the 1960s, leaving blowhards like James Dobson to do it for them.