First Things RSS Feed - David Lyle Jeffrey https://www.firstthings.com/author/david-lyle-jeffrey en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:52:07 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/david-lyle-jeffrey 60 Anticipation https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/03/anticipation https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/03/anticipation Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0500 “With clouds descending,” says the book,
the day of his appearing, thus,
might, just as any other, look
at first like when from broken skies to us
a sudden ray of sun shines through,
greening the ground on which we stand.

Continue Reading »

]]> The Neo-Confucian Bluff https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/11/the-neo-confucian-bluff https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/11/the-neo-confucian-bluff Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 -0400 Against Political Equality:
The Confucian Case
 by tongdong bai
princeton, 344 pages, $39.95

Just Hierarchy:
Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World
by daniel a. bell and wang pei
princeton, 288 pages, $29.95

Continue Reading »

]]> Man, Lion, Calf, and Eagle https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/12/man-lion-calf-and-eagle https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/12/man-lion-calf-and-eagle Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0500 The Fourfold Gospel: A Theological Reading of the New Testament Portraits of Jesus
by francis watson
baker academic, 224 pages, $24.99

Continue Reading »

]]> The Christ of Marc Chagall https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/04/the-christ-of-marc-chagall https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/04/the-christ-of-marc-chagall Tue, 01 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0400 It recently became widely known that the favorite painting of Pope Francis is the White Crucifixion by Marc Chagall. The news stirred up considerable speculation and controversy. Chagall, born Moishe Segal in the Polish-Lithuanian village of Vitebsk (now in Belarus), was probably the most prominent Jewish painter of the twentieth century. His White Crucifixion was not new to religious controversy. It received severely disparaging reviews from Jewish critics when it was first shown in France, and more since. The work (now hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago) represents Jesus the Jew crucified between, on the left, communist soldiers storming a village and, on the right, Nazis desecrating a synagogue. The Crucified, his loins draped in a tallit, or prayer shawl, is hoisted in the middle, a victim of hatreds from left and right alike.

Continue Reading »

]]> God’s Patient Stet https://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/06/gods-patient-stet https://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/06/gods-patient-stet Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400 It is a sobering thought that Richard Wilbur, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (1957, 1989) who was named poet laureate of the United States in 1987, is now ninety years old. David Orr, in a recent Sunday book review in the New York Times , has aptly enough called him “the Grand Old Man of American poetry,” and it is hard to imagine who else could have plausible claim to such a title.

Born on March 1, St. David’s Day, 1921, his fruitful life has spanned the decades of America’s most illustrious rise, greatness, trial, and perhaps demise as an imperial power. Wilbur himself, despite his laurels, has been anything but an imperial poet; indeed, despite his youthful leftist views (during World War II he was removed from the intelligence service on suspicion of disloyalty), on balance he could hardly be said to be a political poet. Yet few, conceivably none since his friend and predecessor as laureate, Robert Frost, have so perfectly exemplified the natural and apolitical American voice—perhaps the quintessence of all that sets America apart among the literary cultures of the modern world—in poetry.

There are odd patrician ironies contesting with this apparently authentic vernacularity; Wilbur, though of modest means, was an eleventh-generation New Englander, and in that sort of remarkable coincidence that often attends intellectual life among the denizens of Harvard Yard, his friendship with the much older Frost at Harvard was aided by the unlikely fact that his wife’s father had been the publisher of Frost’s early poetry.

Wilbur’s latest volume, Anterooms , reflects in its title poem and several others the perspective of his own good old age, wise and full of years. That the tone of this work is free of strident egoism, cynicism, bitterness, or even the slightest hint of self-pity distinguishes it still further from the work of any another writer who has sensed the inevitable approach of mortal silence. The governing image in the title poem is archetypal: a garden in winter in which a sundial emerges from a snowdrift slowly, recrudescent as the returning springtime sun begins to warm the stone. Wilbur plays upon this image, reflecting the intersection of cyclical time with mortal limit, time, and eternity, a boundary not met here in our world except in dreams, he says, which foreshadow that ethereal intermingling

Continue Reading »

]]>