Features
Oberammergau 2000: The passion revised
The Passion Play at Oberammergau is a vast spectacle that can be viewed at many levels. As a dramatic and musical performance, its quality is astonishingly high, considering that everyone connected with the production—from actors, musicians, director and set designer down to the smallest child who cries out “Hosanna,” some 2,200 persons in all—is from this one small German town (population 5,350). The pacing is rapid, the characters are sharply drawn, the dramatic tension remains high throughout, and the 48-voice choir and 75-member orchestra provide a stirring musical accompaniment.
Eruption of truth: An interview with Raimon Panikkar: On inter- and intrareligious dialogue
Voices
Miroslav Volf
Diminished
Our hopes are a measure of our greatness. When they shrink, we ourselves are diminished. The story of American hope over the past two centuries is one of increasing narrowing—or so argues Andrew Delbanco in The Real American Dream. The book’s three chapters are titled “God,” “Nation” and “Self.” The Puritans set their hopes on God and God’s redemption of humanity from its incurvature upon itself: our tendency, in whatever we do, to be interested only in ourselves. In the 19th century, the American nation replaced God as both our hope’s highest object and its surest source.