Category: Liberal Arts
On Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”
By E. J. Hutchinson Why do we read poetry? Why should we? April is National Poetry Month, so it makes sense to take advantage of it to introduce a new series on poetry at Mere Orthodoxy. Its objective is simple:...
Tolkien and the Golden Age of Fantasy
By Thomas Sieberhagen For this is quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is. –John-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not...
Neonatal Euthanasia in the New York Times?
Jen Gunter’s New York Times op-ed about the death of her twenty-two-weeks and three day old son sums up everything that is terrible and tragic about our current debate over what constitutes infanticide. On the surface, her story is just...
Ben Sasse Heightens the Contradictions
In a November 2018 episode of Saturday Night Live, congressman-elect Lt. Cmdr. Dan Crenshaw of Texas appeared with SNL star Pete Davidson. The much-discussed segment came one week after Davidson had made tasteless jokes about Crenshaw’s eye patch, which he...
Book Review: The Classical Revolution by John Borstlap
By Jeremiah Lawson In a time when the President has openly questioned what the United States get from being in NATO and fears that Russian and Chinese influence threaten the stability of the Atlantic American-European order, now would not seem...
Book Review: Music as an Art by Roger Scruton
By Jeremiah Lawson As a written practice, Western music goes back at least a thousand years. Over the centuries music has been made in the service of churches and courts, and from roughly the eighth through the thirteenth centuries was...
Liberalism’s Tax on the Unborn
By Miles Smith In 1781 Thomas Jefferson left the office of governor of Virginia and wrote the sole book-length work attributed to him. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson reflected on what he knew was the great moral...
The Latin and Reformed Imagination
By Felipe Vogel “The Reformation … was more a song or a symphony than a system, more lyric than lecture,” claims Peter Matheson in The Imaginative World of the Reformation. Yet lectures and systems are likely what comes to mind...
Book Review: Philosophy and the Christian
By Nathan L. Cartagena In high school, I rarely took classes with other Christians. This wasn’t intentional. It was the outcome of taking “advanced courses” in a school with “advanced students” who had rejected Christianity by middle school. So though I...
Living Local Fiction
By S. Dorman On first moving to Maine and seeing a line of tall ledges from a nearby road, I was enchanted, surprised. I’d never seen anything like them before: Mountains like waves of rock waiting to crash over the...