First Things RSS Feed - Stephen Schmalhofer

A Forgotten Catholic Novelist

Tue, 09 May 2023 06:00:00 -0400

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 of Notre Dame in the 1920s devoured his novels, ranking him alongside John Henry Newman and Robert Hugh Benson. Russell Kirk was his Romantic disciple, and he endorsed Crawford’s novels as “handsome approaches which we traverse by owl-light” in a “fresh search for the wondrous.”

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Les Murray the Misfit Poet

Mon, 09 May 2022 06:00:00 -0400

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 email, so COVID-19 locked down the manuscript at his home in Bunyah, New South Wales (population: 143). Continuous Creation: Last Poems, published last month, is a farewell to the most important Australian poet since Banjo Paterson.

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The Enduring Appeal of The Nutcracker

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 06:00:00 -0500

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 in Berlin. After a successful opening night, the production flopped. Swallowing his pride, Braunsweg knocked at Diaghilev’s door and raised the issue of his unpaid expenses. According to Neil Tierney’s account in The Unknown Country , “Diaghilev listened attentively, and then replied gravely, ‘Young man, why do you think you will make money in ballet? Look at my shoes’…and uncrossing his legs, Diaghilev turned up the sole of his shoe—it was in holes! ‘You see? I have never made any money in ballet and you never will!’”

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Remembering Gerald Russello (1971–2021)

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 06:00:00 -0500

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 starting his first job in finance. Our host hoped each of us might share a few words of advice for how to stay sane in New York City. The assembled elders recommended a few lively parishes, the best museums, young professionals groups to join, places where the marriageable young women might be met, and more. Some recommended subscribing to First Things , The New Criterion , and City Journal .

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Training the Will on the Football Field

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 09:05:00 -0400

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 clever devils without disciplining the will.” Fr. James Schall, S.J., wrote that “many a young man will acknowledge that his best teacher in high school was a coach.”

Sheen and Schall would have admired the priest who once grabbed my father by the facemask and dragged him out of a fight at the 50-yard line during a high school football game. The message was clear to every young man in the stadium: Play to win, but seek an honorable victory. Your strength is a gift, but get your hits in before the whistle blows. Do not let your selfish pride ruin the hard work of others. These lessons passed from that Father, to my father, to me.

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What She Asks, She Obtains

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 06:00:00 -0400

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, they found the Mother of the Word Incarnate waiting for them. As their lives demonstrate, the Virgin has influenced the art and culture of America—though the nation has never quite come home to her.

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The Making of My Ántonia

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 06:00:00 -0500

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 prairie poetry and promoted her first volume of short stories. When Cather showed her the manuscript of My Ántonia after multiple rejections, Roseboro gave bold advice: “You have really great material. But you have told your novel through the wrong character’s eyes, from the wrong point of view. If you have the courage to throw the [manuscript] away, and sit down and re-write it from [Jim Burden]’s point of view, you have a great book.” Cather rewrote it, and Roseboro judged the result “the book of a lifetime.”

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Rebuild Christchurch Basilica

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 06:00:00 -0400

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, also known as Christchurch Basilica, the spiritual center of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Christchurch. A statue of the Virgin Mary on the north tower became a symbol of hope for the city during the aftermath and aftershocks. The quake had rotated the statue 180 degrees, so that Mary looks out upon the wreckage from the shattered window of the cathedral.

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How the Church Failed Fishtown

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400

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 convenience. The church is one of two in the parish, clustered together under a single administration, ostensibly for better consolidated performance but in reality more like two drunks leaning against each other at the end of the night. A few dozen parishioners duck in and keep their coats on. The Mass drifts along to the final blessing and they shuffle back out onto the street. The composite scene repeats itself in Western Massachusetts, Upstate New York, neighborhoods in Cleveland, Detroit, Bridgeport, and more. The lesson: the Church Establishment failed Fishtown.

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Amazon: Friend of the Christian Family?

Wed, 19 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

U biquitous, 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 recent New York Times article reporting on current and former Amazon employees who alleged extreme working hours, hostility by superiors to family and sick leave, and an office culture of intense confrontation and anonymous sniping. It made for good copy and the unique e-commerce giant is always worth another look.

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