It’s about a quarter to ten at night on August 17, 2019, and I’m standing outside the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, smiling. It’s one of those Edinburgh Festival nights when the streets are still crowded but there’s already a foretaste of autumn in the air, a warning chill in the sea breezes that . . . . Continue Reading »
Twenty years after publishing his first novel—years he spent establishing himself, in incisive, often fearsome essays and reviews and nonfiction books, as a leading literary–cultural critic—Pankaj Mishra had a Damascene moment of sorts. He describes it in a recent essay for . . . . Continue Reading »
Seen today, Jazz on a Summer’s Day shimmers with its glimpses of a world in which people, for all their differences, shared so much. When was the last time so many people got together with such geniality and grace? Continue Reading »
Art gives us structure and clarity; it helps us make sense of the disorder of life. Will Arbery’s Corsicana is a weird play, but you will feel warmer for having seen it—and maybe a little wiser, too. Continue Reading »
Elizabeth Lev joins the podcast to discuss her recent book, The Silent Knight: A History of St. Joseph as Depicted in Art. Continue Reading »
A recent book on the history of Native American rock art invites readers to experience both a profound sense of otherness and a fundamental human bond, neither one cancelling out the other. Continue Reading »
We desperately need more artists like William Kurelek to expose the carnage beneath the surface of our society, and to begin a conversation on why it must end. Continue Reading »
In the Missa Solemnis, Beethoven’s titanic subjectivity seems chastened by suffering and transformed by his engagement with the graced objectivity of liturgical text and tradition. Continue Reading »
As the Church enters Lent 2022, it is well to reflect on and pray over the Catholic understanding that doctrine is light, powerful, and liberating, which some parts of the world Church seem to have forgotten. Continue Reading »
As humanists sought the truth by mastering ancient languages, and reformers by printing the Gospels in vernacular ones, Holbein pursued the truth by recording his subjects—both Protestants and Catholics—in honest, startling detail. Continue Reading »
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