Category: Literature

An Interview with Andrew Peterson About “The Wingfeather Saga”

One of the few highlights of 2020 for me has been getting to read the Wingfeather Saga to my kids. It gave us a bedtime routine and something to look forward to every night for several months as we made...

/ October 12, 2020

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...

/ July 1, 2020

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...

/ June 24, 2020

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,...

/ June 12, 2020

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...

/ May 26, 2020

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...

/ May 4, 2020

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...

/ October 31, 2019

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.

/ August 13, 2019

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...

/ April 26, 2019

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,...

/ April 16, 2019