Camille Paglia calls herself a Democratic libertarian (more about that anon), but she might be more properly called a public encyclopedia, judging by the table of contents in her new book, Provocations: Popular Culture; Film; Sex, Gender, Women; Literature; Art; Education; Politics; and Religion. One category is missing: Science. But even that subject receives some attention in her skeptical view of climate change—which is occurring, she admits, but for reasons that nature alone truly understands. Climate change has been politicized, she argues, and made into an argument that obscures a deeper truth: we cannot control nature and do not yet fully comprehend its ways or what we can do about natural forces. Here religion plays a vital role in her thinking. She is a declared atheist, but she advocates the study of the great religions for their symbolic explorations of mysteries that we still see darkly.

Paglia writes as a university professor and intellectual (the terms are not synonymous to her) who decries the segregation of knowledge into academic disciplines. To teach, say, literature and not also deal with the history of religion, art, popular culture, and the other categories in her table of contents is to indulge in the solipsism of academic specialization that she abhors. For her, the point of education is to open up subjects and then the world to students—not to make adepts in the arcana of their majors. She laments that those who profess to attack the traditional academic canon have