Transforming Quarantine Into Retreat

by George Weigel

Here are some resources that can help redeem the rest of Lent and the upcoming Easter season.  Continue Reading »

1 Apr 2020

Talking All Night

by Alfred Nicol

I asked my friend, the poet,how she was getting by.“Work and tears,”came her reply. “And listening,” she added,“in silence, to be sure.I listen closernow than before. It is a lot like reading,a thing I loved to do . . .What book felt likefirst love to you?” “It was in French,” I . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Jan 2020

Reading the Bard in 2020

by Matthew J. Franck

The Shakespeare-in-a-year reading plan, updated for 2020! Continue Reading »

30 Dec 2019

Demon Screens

by Mark Bauerlein

For adolescents, reading is a negligible activity—they reach for the phone before picking up a book, magazine, or newspaper.  Continue Reading »

11 Nov 2019

Alice McDermott’s Dying Breed

by Shalom Carmy

We often blame the unfavorable treatment of traditional religion in contemporary art on animus or ignorance. Sometimes that’s an accurate assessment. But we underestimate how devilishly difficult it is to depict devout, God-centered characters convincingly, without making them plastic saints or . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Aug 2019

The Art of Spiritual Warfare

by Justin Lee

This Present Darkness by frank e. peretti crossway, 375 pages, $14.99 As a teenager, I was convinced that a spirit of false prophecy had attached itself to my neck. This spirit’s name—according to one of our youth group leaders—was Python, after the ­Pythia, or Oracle of Delphi. I did . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Mar 2019

A Reader's Resolution for 2019

by Matthew J. Franck

The Shakespeare-in-a-year reading plan, newly updated for 2019! Continue Reading »

20 Dec 2018

Briefly Noted

by Various

On Reading Well:  Finding the Good Life through Great Books by karen swallow prior brazos, 272 pages, $19.99 In On Reading Well, Liberty University English professor Karen Swallow Prior sets forth a thoughtful, nuanced vision of the relationship between morality and literature. This vision . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Nov 2018

The Bookish Life

by Joseph Epstein

The village idiot of the shtetl of Frampol was offered the job of waiting at the village gates to greet the arrival of the Messiah. “The pay isn’t great,” he was told, “but the work is steady.” The same might be said about the conditions of the bookish life: low pay but steady . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Nov 2018

How Much Dreiser Does a Man Need?

by Shalom Carmy

Theodore Dreiser is ranked among our great authors; he was a syllabus mainstay for as polished a master as Saul Bellow. Yet he is neither among the great English-language prose stylists nor a writer of nuanced or profound moral vision. His idea of human life was crudely mechanical and deterministic. . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Feb 2018