Left: Photo of art dealer Mary Boone holding her newest offering of art, a cube of refuse manufactured by Latin American and Indian workers seen in Mika Rottenberg's film Squeeze (2010). Right: Still from Squeeze depicting Chinese women massaging the feet of unseen...

Marina Abramovic, Laurie Anderson, Pina Bausch, Elisabeth Kley, Deborah Kass, Shirin Neshat, Shifting the Gaze, and The Visible Vagina.

For at least a decade, arguably two, there's been ample evidence that an avant-garde not only still exists in contemporary art, but that it's comprised almost exclusively of women. If women's...

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This is the sixth and final installment in a series of posts on mosques as seen through the eyes of some of the great novelists, poets, journalists, and critics of the last three centuries. See the fifth installment.

The relationships of cultures are not...

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This is the fifth installment in a series of posts on mosques as seen through the eyes of some of the great novelists, poets, journalists, and critics of the last three centuries. See the fourth installment.

It's no surprise that Western interest in Islam and...

A priest I know to be a self-affirmed heterosexual recently engaged me in a debate on the merits of heterosexuality vs. homosexuality. The conversation went something like this:

"Procreation, Mr. Denson, is a creative force. Those who bring life into the world...

Americans who don't want to see tax cuts for the middle-class held hostage to the wealthy still have time to make themselves heard. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Tea Partiers alike must let their elected officials know that last week's electoral outcome was not a referendum on the extension of tax...

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This is the fourth installment in a series of posts on mosques as seen through the eyes of some of the great novelists, poets, and journalists of the last three centuries. See the third installment.

Having a vast ocean between them, American writers of...

Persephone is a multi-media-musical play within a play featuring Julia Stiles (of the Jason Bourne films and Oleanna on Broadway) in the title role, which last week finished it's premiere run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The collaborative...

This is the third installment in a series of posts on mosques as seen through the eyes of some of the great novelists, poets, and journalists of the last three centuries. See the second installment.

Compared to the European writers discovering the great mosques of Islam for the...

This is the second installment in a series of posts on mosques as seen through the eyes of some of the great novelists, poets, and journalists of the last three centuries. See the first installment.

A century after Lady Mary Montague's 1718 publication of The Turkish...

This is the first in a series of posts on mosques as seen through the eyes of some of the world's great novelists, poets and journalists.

The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke called beauty "the beginning of terror," a consumption of the spirit by which "we are...