First Things RSS Feed - Marion Montgomery https://www.firstthings.com/author/marion-montgomery en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:54:08 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/marion-montgomery 60 At This Still Point of the Turning World https://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/002-at-this-still-point-of-the-turning-world https://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/002-at-this-still-point-of-the-turning-world Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The winter poplars stand”
Strange masts with spars
Under cold stars.
I shall wait a myriad sail of leaves
In spring rains and winds.
I shall bend in starboards and lees
Still riddling the pilgrim signs
Toward the always mysterious ends.

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]]> Angelism and the Provincial Self https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/10/angelism-and-the-provincial-self https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/10/angelism-and-the-provincial-self Fri, 01 Oct 1999 00:00:00 -0400 (Editors’ Note: This essay is adapted from a convocation address presented at Hillsdale College last October.)

I begin with a statement you will agree is true, after which you’re on your own: mine is a more interesting circumstance at this moment than it can possibly be for you. What a fascinating coincidence: you, green in the fall wood of October; I very near the sere and yellow leaf.

Your greening time is for me a fall which speaks hope of an eventual fullness for you, against an old fallenness deeper than the calendar year can now mean for you––especially if you have forgotten your old scion Adam. For me, the sumac and maple and poplar leaves are turning variously and most gloriously toward brown. But here you are at the spring of what I know, better than you, must be a turning year.

And so, in partial celebration of my own fortunate fall, two poems which eventually––not now––may give you delayed pleasure within your own turning world. First “The Scholars,” by William Butler Yeats.

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]]> Walker Percy and the Christian Scandal https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/04/walker-percy-and-the-christian-scandal https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/04/walker-percy-and-the-christian-scandal Thu, 01 Apr 1993 00:00:00 -0500 In Washington, where he was to give the eighteenth Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on May 3, 1989, Walker Percy also gave an interview to Scott Walter for Crisis . This is almost exactly a year before his death, and both the interview and his lecture, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind,” reflect not only his journey up to that point, but a continuing concern for the meaning of the journey and to a degree a continuing ambiguity in his understanding of intellectual experience. He still shares with Binx Bolling an amused wonder in the presence of experience, still somewhat divided of mind as to the dependability of immediate experience, a condition suited to the novelist. Perhaps the point can best be presented by noticing the divided sense in which Percy uses the term liberal in his interview.

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]]> Intense Transforming Care: On the Way Back https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/02/intense-transforming-care-on-the-way-back https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/02/intense-transforming-care-on-the-way-back Mon, 01 Feb 1993 00:00:00 -0500 Slowly: out of that sleep that numbs the knife edge, I come home to a various world, to faces and voices, To a blur of angels at this keep, awaiting.

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]]> The Inescapability of Metaphysics https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/01/the-inescapability-of-metaphysics https://www.firstthings.com/article/1993/01/the-inescapability-of-metaphysics Fri, 01 Jan 1993 00:00:00 -0500 The purpose of the study of philosophy is not to learn what others have thought, but to learn how the truth of things stands. — St. Thomas Aquinas

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