William Deresiewicz not only critiques the idea that college education is about learning marketable skills; he also revives the quest for meaning, self, and soul.
Critics have described Cormac McCarthy as a writer beyond good and evil. But beneath the neuter austerity of McCarthy’s prose, a keen moral imagination is at work.
As a Catholic, O’Connor believed that the physical, perceptible, photo-graphable world is always pointing toward a larger and more enduring metaphysical reality.
"War and Peace" is called the greatest novel ever written, but it’s like sticking a “Kick me” sign on the book. Readers can’t help wanting to take issue with it.
One of Merton’s gifts as a writer was the ability to insinuate himself into the lives of those he'd never met and remain a personal presence decades after his death.
Bruce Chatwin casts travel as an act of sacrifice, of “sloughing-off” the world and discovering the self anew. His work contains moments of aching spirituality.
Stone's characters were human, and humans screw up; there wasn’t much to do about that except to situate the culprits in clarifying narratives of moral scrutiny.
To her fans—and there are many, from critic James Wood to Barack Obama—Robinson shows that old-fashioned virtues like seriousness and simplicity are still virtues.
In their respective books, Jason Moore and Jedediah Purdy both reckon with ecological disaster under capitalism. But John Ruskin knew something they don't.
