Category: Liberal Arts
On “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is a poem about the discovery of new terrains of the imagination made possible by the translation of great works into one’s mother tongue.
Latin for Politics: When the World of Spoken Latin Goes Woke
Up until recently, the spoken Latin community has been preserved from the relentless focus on ideology that characterizes much of the academy. Enthusiasts have gathered at small conferences called “conventicula” (a pretty comprehensive list of events in summer 2018 can...
Farmers and Humanists in an Age of Crisis: Technology, Death, and Resurrection
As a teenager at my parents’ small-town church, I heard men in business suits express relief that they made it out of the farm where they grew up. “I got out,” they would say. The implication: I moved up. I...
Beyond Gunpowder: A Rational Perspective on Cloning
By S. Dorman Hunting is either a discipline or a confused slaughter. Walking home this morning I thought first, not of hunting, but of my usual route along the road. I was also thinking about writing a paper on Johannes...
On Pro-Life Incrementalism
I heard a man say once that one’s entire response to Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option hinged on how one thought about the sustainability of the current social order. That the existing social order is hostile to orthodoxy is obvious. But...
The Protestant World of Shakespeare
By E. J. Hutchinson It is a monstrous waste of time to try to convince oneself, rocking anxiously back and forth in one’s pajamas, that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic—or a Protestant. It is difficult to imagine a more...
Political Objectives and Policies Are Different Things: On Being Consistently Pro-Life
By Stephen Wolfe It is not enough nowadays to be pro-life; you must be consistently pro-life. If you truly care for life, then you must care for all of life − both in and out of the womb. That is,...
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...