While flawed, the 1619 Project is a first step toward disenthralling ourselves from an imagined past of America as history’s designated instrument of liberation.
T.S. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale, recently unsealed, reveal the extent of their thirty-year epistolary romance, and Hale’s undeniable influence on his poetry.
The late Terrence McNally’s work included one play that stirred considerable controversy among American Catholics. It’s worth revisiting that debate today.
COVID-19 restrictions have had a devastating impact on independent cinemas. But thankfully, a special program of films about nuns is now available online.
Many of us are familiar with the absurdity-unto-death that is working remotely. Forget the zoom-and-gloom: put down your devices and pick up these new books.
The collection ‘Oblivion Banjo’ is a major work of American poetry by a poet who draws the reader into the inner workings of his imagination as few others do.
Corpus Christi gives parish Catholicism a jolt of Protestant spiritual energy, reaffirming Christ’s message of love, delivered by a criminal-cum-priest.
The selves that constitute the poet Lawrence Joseph are particularly numerous and peculiarly unlikely: he’s a Catholic, a leftist, an Arab-American, and a lawyer.
In 'Softness of Bodies,' the story of a flighty young poet in Berlin pivots from comedy to drama, from shoplifted shoes to darker issues of money and violence.
Problems have solutions, while mysteries like suffering, love, and death do not. They must be instead lived out with attention to human richness and interconnection.
Set in a miserable dystopia, Houellebecq’s latest novel is both thought-provoking and wearying, fronted by a hypercynical yet dangerously nostalgic narrator.
Theodore Roszak’s work was more than an apologia for 60s counterculture. It was one of the era’s most impassioned attempts to revitalize the utopian imagination.
Rather than the politics of sainthood, Malick’s film mirrors the reality of things themselves. Like faith itself, they can’t be so much articulated as experienced.
At the center of Malick’s film is Jägerstätter’s incomprehensible decision to give his life away, ostensibly benefiting no one. But such heroism ultimately wins.
With the release of Terrence Malick’s Jägerstätter biopic, the martyr’s biography has finally come into broader public view. But his sacramental devotions haven’t.
In an old-growth forest, everything is connected. No individual plant or animal, and indeed no species, is an island. As Pope Francis warns, we should pay attention.
William Blake critiqued the Enlightenment, industrialization, and the expansion of the British empire. His work shines at the Tate as the shadows of Brexit loom.
What we find outside are physical manifestations of the holy, representative of the sloughing off of old skin, the salt of blood and the sea, signs of the divine.
Refugees and migrants encounter homesickness as they struggle to establish identities in unfamiliar, often unwelcoming territory. Three books show how they do it.
Fiction is hard. Nonfiction is hard for different reasons: the need to ensure accuracy, the risk of angering your subjects. These books succeed brilliantly.
