Archive

Though he is almost forgotten today, the Romantic novelist Francis Marion Crawford, a Catholic convert, outsold his friend Henry James in the early twentieth century. Undergraduates at the University...

When the great Australian poet Les Murray died in April 2019, he left an incomplete volume of new work in his desk drawer. Murray preferred the typewriter and avoided...

In 1926, Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the renowned ballet company Ballets Russes, hired Polish-born impresario and ballet director Julian Braunsweg to produce a performance at the prominent Deutsches Künstlertheater...

A few years ago, a mutual friend organized a group lunch in midtown Manhattan for a young man new to the city, fresh out of a selective university, and...

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen once remarked that the football field is the only place on a school campus that trains the will. Teachers impart knowledge, but this “can create...

When historian Henry Adams and his fellow Americans—including Augustus St. Gaudens, Margaret Terry Chanler, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton—traveled from the New World to our old home in Europe,...

This year marks the centenary of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, and we can thank Viola Roseboro for its creation. As an editor at muckraking McClure’s Magazine, Roseboro noticed Cather’s...

In February 2011, a 6.3-magnitude earthquake devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 185 people and damaging dozens of historic buildings. Among the ruins is the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament,...

The sign outside the church lists a single Sunday Mass time. The bulletin provides details on the other sacraments, available by appointment only, more of a consignment than a...

Ubiquitous, yet remote. Disruptive, yet family friendly. A technologist’s dream, yet dedicated to “working back from the customer.” Among writers on my newsfeed, First Things deputy editor Matthew Schmitz was the lone respondent to the...

We are relearning that marriage is not optional. The evidence started piling up in 1965 with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the breakdown of the African-American family. In 2012,...

Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited said of Catholic marriage, “that’s one thing your Church can do,” he said, “put on a good show.” My wife paraphrases: “We...