Every few days I pick up Emily Dickinson’s poems and sample three or four lyrics. I would call them a calming reprieve from the bustle of the day, but that epithet doesn’t quite fit the verse. It’s more like an arresting spotlight on existence. Continue Reading »
China Bans Wordplay in an Attempt at Pun Control
Tania Branigan, The Guardian
Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, by Marina Warner
Eilis NiDhuibhne, The Irish Times
Orpheus Alone
Mark Strand, Poetry Foundation
In Leonard Cohen’s twelfth studio album, Popular Problems, he depicts himself as a prophet on the run, defending small, quiet truths against constantly changing cultural noise.
Continue Reading »
Please, No Google in the Gallery
M. Anthony Mills, City Journal
Letter to a Friend on the Ressourcement
E. Milco, Ursus Elisei
The Writing Class
Jaswinder Bolina, Poetry Foundation
His Reason
Michael Spence, The New Criterion
Emerging Mores to Write More on Morays Continue Reading »
If you read First Things, you’ll probably enjoy these events in New York, Massachusetts, and Alabama. Continue Reading »
The book of Job has served as a philosophical Rorschach blot for its most outspoken interpreters, from the Talmudic rabbis and Church Fathers through their medieval philosophical successors and down to modern philosophers, theologians, and creative writers. The individual characters in whose elusive speech the narrative unfolds—God, Satan, Job himself, his three interlocutors, the belated guest Elihu—tend to become stock representatives of philosophical positions or exemplars of religious judgment. Continue Reading »
Do We Speak the Same Language as God?
Alan Montefiore, Standpoint
How The Strand Keeps Going in the Age of Amazon
Christopher Bonanos, Vulture
Law and Violence
John Inazu, The Hedgehog Review
Mechanics of a Myth
Mark Mitchell, Verse Daily
I haven’t followed the details of the UVA sex scandal. Unless one is an administrator with responsibilities for such things, keeping one’s distance from the facts is probably best for one’s moral health. Indeed, we didn’t need this particular news story to know that there’s a problem. We’ve embarked on a de-regulation of sexual relations. In the official ideology of our time, our bodies are machines available to provide us with pleasure. The same holds for the bodies of others, limited only by consent. Today, at places like UVa this is the unquestioned and unquestionable orthodoxy. Continue Reading »
A new biography of Joseph Stalin offers an account of the rise of Soviet Russia which has clear relevance for contemporary foreign policy. Continue Reading »
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