Fine, who begins in her role at Yale in October, is the executive director and CEO of the Los Angeles-based Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.
Schiff, a New Haven native whose Yale career spanned more than 60 years, was a devoted archivist, historian, teacher, and mentor. She died on July 11 at age 84.
A few essays have taken their place in the great tradition as masterpieces of intellectual demolition. Among such classics stands Samuel Johnson’s Review of Soame Jenyns’ A Free Enquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Evil. Jenyns’s “glib optimism” in the face of human suffering (as Walter Jackson Bate called it), and his complacency over the problem that suffering poses to religious belief, struck a nerve. If Johnson knew anything