Category: Literature
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...
The Prophet of Unbelief: On Arthur Clough, T. S. Eliot’s Forgotten Predecessor
By Clark Elder Morrow Allow me to quote a brace of familiar lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Choruses from ‘The Rock'”: In the land of lobelias and flannels The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit, The nettle shall flourish...
Book Review: Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Malcolm Guite
I’m pleased to publish this guest review by Dr. Mischa Willett. Let’s get one thing straight: there is nothing wrong with shooting an albatross. As even casual readers in the history of English literature will know, a sailor’s shooting the...
Misreading Tolkien and Misreading Scripture: Responding to O’Keefe and Reno
I am reading John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno’s Sanctified Vision for the independent study on hermeneutics and theological method I am doing this summer. I have found the book fairly helpful overall, and think the authors are right...
Soma and the Silencing of Evangelicalism After Trump
In his novel Silence Japanese writer Shusaku Endo tells the story of two Portuguese missionaries in 17th century Japan. After initial pioneering work by Francis Xavier in the 16th century, a small native Japanese church had begun to flourish in the...
The Worldly Poetry of the Puritans
I’m pleased to have Stephen Wolfe back with us again today for this piece on Puritan poetry. The common understanding of the Puritans, in both popular and academic circles, is that they were hostile to all art, despisers of human...
Blame Jacques Derrida for Donald Trump.
I’m pleased to run this guest piece by S.D. Kelly, particularly given the direction the Trump campaign has gone in the past week. A dozen years after his death, the ideas promoted by the historian and philosopher Jacques Derrida still...
Tolkien’s Holy Fools
At one point in The Lord of the Rings Gandalf, the great wizard-hero of the story, is asked by another character what hope there is that Frodo and Sam would fulfill their quest and destroy Sauron’s ring of power. “There never...
Walt Whitman on Neighbors and Strangers
It is good to remember, especially in light of these presidential primaries, that no era is without its share of baffling endorsements. Andrew Carnegie, whose imperious steel mills did more than perhaps anyone to antagonize the neo-transcendentalist folklore of Leaves...
Who says memorialism isn’t “sacramental”?
In the latest iteration of that interminable meme beloved by traditionalist conservatives everywhere, “Everything is terrible because of Protestantism” Peter Leithart has argued that Protestants cannot write because of our impoverished theology of the sacraments. His argument, particularly in part...