Arts & Letters – Spirituality

The melodies and meaning of Cambodia’s Buddhist music Glancing furtively over his orange-robed shoulder, a young Cambodian monk clambered up the steep sides of the stone stupa. Standing atop Wat Ounalom’s shrine to the Buddha’s hair tuft relic, facing the first glimmerings of dawn, he breathed in the cool morning air and began to sing “Lotus Flower Offering” (botum thvay phka): Fresh blooms of lotus— I offer them with joy....

Dostoevsky and Flaubert should be studied together as progenitors of the modern novel. The end of 2021 witnessed an unusual literary event: the bicentennials of two geniuses of modern fiction. They were arguably the leading novelists of their respective countries: the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11) and the Frenchman Gustave Flaubert (December 12). No conclusive biographical evidence exists that Dostoevsky ever read Madame Bovary (1857) or anything else by Flaubert....

Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition by Patricia S. Churchland; Norton, 226 pp., $27.95 The War For Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World by Jamil Zaki; Crown, 261 pp., $27 These two new books give lucid, stimulating accounts of recent discoveries in neuroscience and psychology. Both authors aim to challenge antiquated views of the brain and human behavior. In so doing, they help us think through perennial debates about...

Edward Gibbon sits proudly upon my bookshelf. A set of volumes that I own, neatly stacked, comprises his “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” What do you make of me because it is there? The set might indicate that I am a classicist, a scholar. It could signal my ambition—or my vanity. Perhaps it marks me as an anachronism: In this impatient, up-to-the-second moment, I display...