Original Sin—A Theological Reading of Innovation

We can have sympathy for the dandies. To live, as many of them did, in a rapidly changing, ever-industrializing Paris, where alleyways and artisans were constantly being supplanted by grands boulevards and department stores, must have been disorienting; the ease of technological reproduction at once dazzling and destabilizing. A whole host of liter... See more

Which is all to say: there is always something a little, well, dangerous, about the concept of originality: a danger that has been elided by our contemporary startup-statured culture, which holds as gospel that imitation is for normies, and innovation for the kind of geniuses most people now secretly believe themselves to be.