Eiseley, Darwin, and the Weird Portentous
Loren Eiseley was born in 1907. He died in 1977. For many years and until his death, he was the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. A...
View ArticleFury: The Beautification of Violence?
Guest post by Christine A. Scheller I loathe violent movies. When my husband watches them at home, I escape to another room or ask him to change the channel. This has been especially true since our son...
View ArticleMonasticism in Lockdown America, Part 8: Psalms, In the Beginning
I always privately hated the psalms. Most of them, anyway. As a teenager, I’d leaf through the Bible’s songbook quite often and feel it was full of self-pity and self-righteousness, often launching...
View ArticleMonasticism in Lockdown America, Part 9: Psalms, In the End
Continued from yesterday. Thinking of the psalms as a way to cycle through the entire range of human experience, I recently brought them with me into juvenile detention. The kids there, on Sunday...
View ArticleOriginal Sin and the Warp Effect
One of the great writers—to my recollection, Flannery O’Connor—said something to the effect that everything we touch is warped by original sin, even our greatest virtues. If I am interpreting her...
View ArticleWhere’s the Guilt?
I’ve had the experience of dealing with renters from time to time, though more in the capacity of property manager than as landlord. It has been one of the ugliest, most unpleasant things a person can...
View ArticleA Requiem for Rejects
By Chad Thomas Johnston He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. —Isaiah...
View ArticleSave the Economy: Read the Classics
I was reading Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si when I began an article called “What is Wrong with the West’s Economies?” Published in the August 13, 2015 issue of The New York Review of Books, the...
View ArticleBrush With a Famous Writer
By Ann Conway I was walking down a concourse in the Philly airport when I looked up to see the Famous Writer staring down at me. Actually at first glance I was sure I was looking at the British actor,...
View ArticleHow to Win the War on Christmas
After thirteen years of parenting, my husband and I still know virtually nothing about raising children. But one thing we’ve always agreed on, since even before the first one was conceived, is not...
View ArticleA Space Program
The tenth item on a list entitled “How to Watch This Film,” which accompanies Tom Sachs’ A Space Program, says that the film is “a love letter to the analog era.” That obsession with all things...
View ArticleThe Wounds of Resurrection
As my husband prepared for an Easter sermon a few weeks ago, our dinnertime conversations during Lent turned to Jesus’s appearance to the disciples after his resurrection, to the episode where poor...
View ArticleImpounded by Poetry
By Cathy Warner After one glass of wine, one poetry reading, and two hours, my bill totaled $452.21, and I hadn’t even bought Paul Nelson’s book. At least the tow truck driver was apologetic. “I waited...
View ArticleThe Smell of Black Mold
By John Bryant I write in order that the ornery old bastard and toothless schizophrenic might be more welcome in my life. The man who calls three times a day to give voice to his shattered mind. I met...
View ArticlePoetry Friday: “Intercession: For My Daughter” by Brett Foster
We pass into this world at birth. We pass out of it at death. And in between: holiness and horrors. This is probably the largest of themes that a poet could take on, and in “Intercession: For My...
View ArticleThe Nightingale Floors
In Kyoto, Japan, seventeenth-century Nijo Castle contains an architectural feature meant to protect the ruling shogun. The floors in the inner most chambers are constructed in such a way that the nails...
View ArticleMy Bad Italy Novel
February is offseason in Rome, so today the city is a little gray, a little quiet, if ever it could be such a thing. I’m standing on the steps of San Luigi Dei Francesi church, buzzing a little from a...
View ArticlePraying for a Hurricane on an Ordinary Wednesday Afternoon
“It is easier to survive a category five hurricane than it is to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.” That paraphrase of Walker Percy (from his essay, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise”) was...
View ArticleBrunelleschi’s Balancing Act
The story goes that one day Filippo Brunelleschi, the goldsmith who would go on to become the most important architect in Europe and arguably the originator of the Renaissance, devises a practical joke...
View ArticleThe Case For Charlie Gard
Charlie Gard, the English child you see here, will likely die—indeed, by the time this is published, he may have already died. Charlie has Mitochondrial DNA Depletion Syndrome, which in short means...
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