Andrew Delbanco

Jan 21, 2025 | laphamsquarterly.org | George Steiner |Howard Singerman |Andrew Delbanco |Jamie James

In the West, the notion of “literacy” is inseparable from the growth of monasticism and church schools after the decay of the Roman Empire. To be “literate” signified the ability to read Scripture, to form letters on the page. This capacity, often rudimentary, defined the cleric and the clerk, these two designations being closely related.

Apr 4, 2024 | laphamsquarterly.org | Andrew Delbanco |George Steiner

On my campus is a handsome domed building with these words inscribed across its facade: erected for the students that religion and learning may go hand in hand and character grow with knowledge. Built about a hundred years ago, the structure is in reasonably good repair, but the purpose for which it was built (it still houses the office of the university chaplain) is in ruins. I’ve never met a student who knows what’s written above the door. Religion and learning hand in hand?

Mar 28, 2024 | nybooks.com | Andrew Delbanco

Writing in 1998, fifty years after the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead,Norman Mailer called his younger self an “amateur,” by which he intended something between self-deprecation and self-praise, leaning toward the latter. He had grown up in Brooklyn in a Jewish family that was modest in both means and manners.

Jun 9, 2023 | wsj.com | Andrew Delbanco

Fifty years ago, Allan Bakke, a white military veteran with a solid academic record, was turned down for medical school at the University of California, Davis. Bakke filed suit, claiming that when the university set aside 16 seats for racial minorities, it violated his right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Eventually the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the quota unconstitutional and ordered that he be admitted. Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Apr 10, 2023 | libertiesjournal.com | Jake Harrison |Andrew Delbanco

On ReparationsAndrew Delbanco My subject is really three subjects that together constitute a single theme at the heart of American life. First, slavery itself — that form of human relations by which, for more than two centuries, white persons exerted unappeasable power over black persons as if they were tools or livestock.