“The Washington Post” had a rather remarkable feature, in a special Museums insert, on this painting, the Alba Madonna by Raphael. Painted around 1508 and currently in D.C.’s National Gallery, it’s considered the high point of Renaissance art and one of the greatest paintings ever made. But why? The Post asked some art historians, and two of them zeroed in on Raphael’s portrayal of Christ.

From Leo Steinberg:

This is the action: The little Saint John is presenting the cross to the Christ child, as if to remind him of what the purpose of his life is. The child does not need to be reminded: He seizes the cross, almost triumphantly. It’s done as if in play, and that’s the genius of Raphael: to disguise the theology under the aspect of infant play. And the Virgin interrupts her reading, in which all of this is foretold — she’s not reading the latest bestseller, she’s reading the Book of Isaiah. And then, gently extending her right hand toward Saint John, she thinks, “Not yet.”

Heaven has come down to earth. This is very clearly spelled out in the Alba Madonna: You have the blue sky, the landscape washed by that same blue, and no other blue in that picture but in the Virgin’s dress.

From Alexander Nagel (Gopnik is the interviewer):

On the one hand, there seems to be an emphasis on a single moment, and on the other hand an emphasis on things enduring through time.

There is the sense that John’s head has just looked up, that Christ’s head has just turned, that the Virgin has come to attention, and that all of them are magnetized for a second by the cross that Christ has grasped. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine it as a moment in any obvious sequential drama: the whole thing seems poised and static.

And that contrast seems to me to be reflected in the composition of the picture. In how the figures represent a highly dynamic group distributed in space and involving quite a bit of twisting and turning, and yet they also create a kind of flat, orderly hexagon on the surface. . . .

So in both the treatment of the narrative moment and the structure of the composition, a great deal of motion and complexity is reconciled with something very stable and unchanging.

This duality in the painting also produces a particular kind of theological emphasis. It advances the notion that the contingent, the earthly, the episodic, is also part of a larger, timeless plan. All the separate little episodes of history — a child dandled by his mother in a meadow, for instance, as she puts down her book — look to us like they’ve happened in an almost accidental way, but this painting reveals that they’re all part of God’s supratemporal plan.

GOPNIK: After all, why is there a cross in this scene, so many years before Christ’s Crucifixion? The object is almost a toy, two flimsy reeds lashed together by a little shepherd boy named John. Yet even as Jesus reaches for that toy, the part above his fingers assumes the proportions of the crossed beams he will be nailed to — at that moment, the reeds become the cross of the crucifixion.

NAGEL: Yes, The cross here can exist as a symbol of the Crucifixion before the actual event of the Crucifixion because the divine plan cuts through mere chronology.

This relationship between history and the divine scheme is a persistent, profound issue in Christian theology. And in this painting a new set of artistic problems — which have to do with balancing a detailed description of nature and human bodies with a larger sense of compositional and structural order — have created new insights into it.

Smith college student Maggie Mertens gives her personal testimony in “I Will Follow Him”: Obama As My Personal Jesus. Excerpts:

Obama is my Jesus.

While you may be overtly religious and find this to be idol-worshipping, or may be overtly politically correct and just know that everything in that sentence could be found offensive, I’m afraid it’s true anyway.

As with many spiritual enlightenments, mine came in the middle of a bleak, hopeless period of my life. The innocent, idealistic world of politics that had shaped my childhood, the one that taught me how the president is a good guy, one who makes you feel safe, gives a speech on TV every once in a while and one you’d feel honored to shake hands with, had been slowly whittled into a deep rooted cynicism to anything politically related.

The crush of the Bush victory over Gore was only the first mar on my previously consummate ideal of the American administration. And the tragedies just kept continuing: Bush’s response to the Sept.11 attacks, the invasion of Iraq, the tax cuts for the rich, the downward spiral continued squashing my scant hope that the political world and state of our country could be saved.

Then I found my miracle. Stumbling through my hopeless world, afraid to turn to anyone with my political questions of morality, my concerns about the afterlife of the country I called home, a voice spoke to me.

Barack Obama bore to me his testimony in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention, a testimony that included believing in concepts as simple and wholesome as the Constitution; a belief the current administration had done away with entirely. . . .

I’ve officially been saved, and soon, whether they like it or not, the rest of the country will be too. I will follow him, all the way to the White House, and I’ll be standing there in our nation’s capital in January 2009, when Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America. In the name of Obama, Amen.

I enjoy reading scholars defending their theories after they have been proven wrong. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote a provocative essay entitled “The End of History.” Written at a time when communism was collapsing, Fukuyama argued that democracy and free market economics have won. There are no alternatives. That means that the conflicts that have defined history are over. We will now live happily ever after.

In this column, Fukuyama (who is a real scholar with a conservative bent) revisits his thesis in light of the new Russian aggression, the persistance of anti-democratic rule in places like China, and the new host of international conflicts. He insists that his point is still valid in that there are no IDEOLOGICAL competitors to democracy and capitalism.

He does mention Islam and nationalism, but I think he underestimates the former as an all-encompassing totalitarian ideology. And I think he misses what China may be creating: A synthesis of totalitarianism and capitalism that may well crystalize into a new ideology. (It will be similar to National Socialism, which we have seen before.)

But in his latest column, Fukuyama goes further and perhaps changes his tune. Writing after the meltdown and the bailout in the financial market, he says that the “American brand” is damaged. The financial crisis has made American-style capitalism look bad. And American-style democracy has taken a hit because of the way it is being used to justify the war in Iraq. As an alternative, he says, nations around the world might consider the “Russian model” or the “Chinese model.”

On Saturday, I was at Patrick Henry College for homecoming, meeting and greeting alumni. Someone asked me if the readership on my blog dropped during our weekend embargo on political talk. I told him that I hadn’t checked yet (it hadn’t, actually!), but that I was glad he read my blog. I asked him if he ever commented, using some secret handle. He said he was Webmonk! It turns out, Webmonk is married to someone I work with! I had assumed that a web monk, you know, wouldn’t even be married. I also assumed he was the same person as Internetmonk, who writes a blog I read some time. All wrong. But here he is, someone right in my neighborhood.