Thursday
May 28, 2020
Subscribe
Print or Web publication

Greta Austin

Greta Austin is a professor of medieval European religious history at the University of Puget Sound. Names and places in this essay have been changed at the request of a relative of the author's.

St. Augustine and the Hall of Memory placeholder image

St. Augustine and the Hall of Memory

Like the philosopher, my aunt kept house in her imagination, tending to the sensations and images of the past

by Greta Austin | Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Smarty Pants Podcast

Newsletter


THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

2nd Look

A Tale of War and Forgetting

by Neil Shea

In honor of Memorial Day this Monday, we’re revisiting this powerful essay from contributing editor Neil Shea, written just after the centennial of the First World War. Shea reflects on the war through the lens of Impressionist painting— viewed up close, he writes, “there is bravery and blindness, splinters of bone and steel, mud, horror, cacophony.” As time goes on, however, we risk seeing the war “as a vague event portrayed in colors that seem almost quaint.”