Category: Literature
D. B. Hart’s Inquisitor
“It is hard to understand the psychology of pious Christians who calmly accept the fact that their neighbors, friends, and relatives will perhaps be damned. I cannot resign myself to the fact that the man with whom I am drinking...
Beauty Spots
…When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need...
On Diligence
I was the sort of teenager who studied too much Latin. I was homeschooled, then, and lonely. We lived in Rome. I had no friends. I read books off my mother’s shelves for most subjects — textbooks, and Madame Bovary,...
Back to the Sources: Notes on Chesterton the Historian
G.K. Chesterton wore many hats in his lifetime. His enterprises as a writer, philosopher, and theologian yielded a majority of the recognition, but we ought also consider Chesterton the historian. Chesterton—though it was not explicitly amongst his primary faculties of...
Cats and Sixty Foot Whales: Reflections on Children’s Books
The most expensive preschools in America bear a pine-scented resemblance to those senna-tinted photographs of a world before plastics, albeit with no unseemly hint of poverty. Within the world of Waldorf, Montessori and Wild Forest schools the hand dominates the...
Happy Reformation Day, or, How Melanchthon Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jesus
Obviously, everyone should celebrate Reformation Day. At this point, even the Church of Rome has surreptitiously attempted to take on board many of the Reformation’s emphases, albeit in impure form and without the necessary dogmatic changes—er, development[1]—that would allow her...
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.
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...
On Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”
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: to read some poems,...
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...