The history of traditions is not only a history of approach. It is also a history of turning away—of contempt generated, encoded, and transmitted across centuries through the ordinary mechanisms of culture: law, performance, art, liturgy, habit. Divergence examines those mechanisms. Not to indict, but to understand. The methodology is forensic rather than devotional. What gets carried forward, how it travels, and why it persists long after the institutions that generated it have formally renounced it.
There is a particular quality to the German countryside that is difficult to explain to someone who has never stood inside it. I love the American countryside. The long fields of Ohio and Indiana, the quiet dignity of a country road disappearing into the distance, the sense that the land goes on forever and the […]
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