Category: Literature
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...
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...
Living Local Fiction
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 land. Not long...
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...