Ben Lerner’s elegant, amusing essay turns on a distinction between Poetry and poems. Poetry is Caedmon’s dream, a virtual ideal that actual poems can’t live up to. “The fatal problem with poetry,” Lerner writes, is “poems.” Every poet is, inevitably, “a tragic figure.” Continue Reading »
“For me, the true poet is the metaphysician.” That is almost certainly an exaggeration. But we ignore the metaphysician in the poet at our own peril. Continue Reading »
Part 3, SERVICE. When you join a committee, you either make your colleagues' workdays easier or make them harder. If the latter, they will remember the fact and it may very well come up at tenure time. Continue Reading »
John Quincy Adams stands out as a model for twenty-first-century American politicians because he aimed not to please, but to do the right thing, irrespective of the cost. Continue Reading »
A new film, The Innocents, tells a moving story of healing and grace without downplaying the grief and trauma that preceded them. And it does this while addressing a moral blind spot of our popular culture. Continue Reading »
As in all authentic discernment, one comes to recognize both light and shadow. Only thus can one learn and move forward. Continue Reading »
The tragic side of the Reformation is obvious to those who care deeply about the unity of the church and who feel keenly the dys-evangelical impact of a fractured Christian community and its muted witness in our world today. Continue Reading »
In other circumstances, the bad odor of the Clintons would be off-putting. But our leadership class has just received a shock: They have become aware that their consensus isn’t as widely shared as they imagined. Continue Reading »
This September, the Roman Catholic Church will canonize Mother Teresa, the great nun and humanitarian, in a vivid reminder that saintliness continues in our contemporary world. Less well known in the West—and unknown to me before I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy—are the many Orthodox saints who demonstrate the same truth. Continue Reading »
When I think of the generation of survivors—not only of the horror they endured during the Holocaust and its recollection, not only of the nobility or heroism many of them achieved, but of the virtually impossible small and great steps they were compelled to make to rehabilitate their lives and ours—it is Wiesel’s voice that underlies and often amplifies theirs. Continue Reading »
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