I’ve written down the details to order it, unless I can persuade the university library to buy the book.

The Gothic, Romanticism’s gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today’s Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives. [...]

Fictions such as the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West’s premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci Code and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan’s Labyrinth, Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like.

However, I would like to suggest including the following link because it collects and evaluates the sources for all the allegedly controversial statements of Gauck’s which are cited all over:

http://blog.karlshochschule.de/2012/02/20/gauck-in-der-filterbubble-oder-wie-wir-lernten-den-kontext-zu-ignorieren/

The politics of any country are always reported differently from the outside than inside the country itself. I think that’s only natural, because the perspective is different and even a very well informed journalist does not necessarily get every nuance. Though one of my favourite news articles about former president Wulff was from a Ghanaese newspaper, which basically said, “Look, in Europe they have corrupt politicians, too, because politicians are the same everywhere.”

At any rate, I’m glad you like the posts (and the linkdumps and Misfits posts of course)

Hamburger Abendblatt is a pretty good newspaper, but not exactly objective in this case, since it is published by the Axel Springer AG. And the Springer AG is also the publisher of the tabloid Bild which was instrumental in the downfall of Christian Wulff and also heavily pushed Joachim Gauck.