Even Voltaire, who is perhaps the most persistent, powerful, vocal Enlightenment critic of religion, directs his polemic mostly against the Catholic Church in France – "l'infâme" in his famous sign-off in his letters, "Écrasez l'infâme" ("Crush the infamous") refers to the Church, not to religion as such.
According to this retrospective self-assessment, the whole of Kierkegaard's work "is related to Christianity, to the problem 'of becoming a Christian,' with a direct or indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call Christendom, or against the illusion that in such a land as ours all are Christians of a sort" (1848, 5 6).
Best, because most direct as a humanist polemic, is a near-life-size portrait of the artist in cardinal's regalia (Johnson).
Thus, during the medieval period there were polemics directed against that claim, as well as expositions of the nature of prophecy that, without dealing directly with Muhammad's claim, could be taken to undercut it as in the case of Maimonides' The Guide for the Perplexed).
On the roof of the museum, there is a more mischievous but equally effective work of anti-war polemic, this time directed against the Americans.
Last month, the Appalachian writer Elizabeth Catte published a spiky polemic with a helpfully direct title, "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia".
His scintillating and biting polemic Ein Vade Mecum für den Herrn Samuel Gotthold Lange (1754) was directed against the carelessly corrupt translations of the poetry of Horace by the arrogant scholar S.G.
In March, The Atlantic published a long polemic by Graeme Wood, entitled "What ISIS Really Wants," that argues "Islam" and "ISIS" are worthy of direct verbal conflation ("The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic").. Haykel provides Wood's sole scholarly support.
Yet apparently, the thrust of his efforts is directed toward establishing the idea of the eternity of the Torah, apparently in response to the Jewish-Christian polemic on this topic.
When he was defending a notion of permanent value in his mid-nineties "culture war" polemic, "The Culture of Complaint," it wasn't with a sniffy reference to Plato or Dante, but through his direct experience as an amateur carpenter, of the practice of planing, sawing, varnishing, and getting it right.
