One interesting phenomenon in the Gibson neo-Nazi passion movie has been the eight-month long rising crescendo of intellectual comment on the movie.
I have learned a great deal about the historic times in 30-50CE Jerusalem since the first group of biblical scholars blasted Gibson last April. I learned that the lingua franca was Greek not Latin. The Romans would have been speaking Greek. I already knew that Jesus had probably studied with the Cynics. I read the four gospels and found how different Mathew was and how Mathew’s version became the Roman Catholic hate version. I learned how America has become a nation of Jesus freaks in the last thirty years. And most importantly I learned how some of the pagan based Catholic groups use unremitting masochism as a vehicle for religious redemption.
I suspect that the great intellectual outpouring may have come from the sense of total irrelevance that lefty intellectuals have felt since the end of Communism and the rise of Arab anti-Modernism.
The University of Chicago School of Thought has been so powerful and dominant for the past three to six years, that many intellectuals must feel left out.
Incidental to that point --- I already knew that David Brooks was a U. of Chicago alumnus, but I just learned the same is true of Ed Rothstein. These are the only two people I read religiously in the NYTimes.
My guess is that each of them, and me, got from the U of Chicago a love of original sources. Original sources is clearly is what distinguishes the University of Chicago from most other schools. From that love of original sources, we may have concluded that life is only lived in the intense world of original minds. Ideas and thinkers are forever alive and exciting for each of us.