Gregory Wolfe

When Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in The Atlantic in 1991, it galvanized a national conversation about the state of American literature and how creative writing was being taught, produced, and consumed by the reading public. Among other points, Gioia argued that poetry had become obscure, self-referential, and detached from common experience through the influence of university writing programs and trendy ideological nostrums. Gioia’s latest essay, “The Catholic Writer Today,” published in the December 2013 issue of First Things, bears a striking resemblance to his Atlantic essay on poetry . . . Continue Reading »

The Finishing School by Muriel Spark Doubleday. 192 pp. $16.95 Muriel Spark, Dame of the British Empire, expatriate Scot living in Tuscany, has been practicing her peculiar brand of elegant satire for half a century. Approaching ninety, Spark has just published The Finishing School , her . . . . Continue Reading »

Tony Hendra’s Father Joe was given a front page review in the New York Times Book Review in which it was very nearly damned with shrill praise. The reviewer, Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic pundit, certainly did not damn the book in terms of sales”his review undoubtedly helped make the . . . . Continue Reading »

Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by Ross King Walker and Company. 373 pp. $28. According to Giorgio Vasari, author of the monumental Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects , Michelangelo was so secretive about his work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that Pope Julius II, the . . . . Continue Reading »

Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual by Lynn Gamwell Princeton University Press. 344 pp. $49.95 In 1959, the British writer and science popularizer C. P. Snow published his Rede Lecture at Cambridge University as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution , touching off a . . . . Continue Reading »

Within three years of its completion, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper began to flake and fade. The artist had staked his masterpiece, which he spent over two years painting, on a technical gamble, and lost. Always the inventor, Leonardo had come up with the novel idea of applying oil paint . . . . Continue Reading »

In the summer of 1952, Hilton Kramer’s life took a fateful turn. While attending a program known as the “School of Letters” in Indiana”where he had gone to study Dante with Allen Tate and Shakespeare with Francis Fergusson”the young Kramer met Philip Rahv, one of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Theologians move in two worlds, working not only with the abstract categories of philosophy but also with the highly concrete and often complex literary forms of the Bible. One of the central tasks of biblical theology is to provide a description of God that is compelling as well as truthful. If . . . . Continue Reading »

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen HarperCollins, 179 pages, $20 Ron Hanen’s Mariette in Ecstasy is a haunting, enigmatic novel that is almost impossible to categorize, and it represents a radical departure from Hansen’s previous work. His first two novels, Desperadoes and The . . . . Continue Reading »