Our summer fiction is now live, featuring Liam Callahan’s short story “Exhibit A”; Mollie Wilson O’Reilly’s essay on reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Rebecca Mead’s book, My Life in Middlemarch; and Rand Richards Cooper’s review of the Pawel Pawlikowski film Ida. Plus, Eduardo Moisés Peñalver on the “fundamental” incompatibility between the “Ayn Rand, natural-rights libertarianism Paul Ryan has flirted with and Catholic teachings on the nature and limits of private ownership,” and Rita Ferrone on why it is time to retire the chalice and return to the cup:

According to Eucharistic Prayer I, Jesus took “this” cup in his hands. Why this cup? There was an early controversy concerning whether water might be used instead of wine in the Eucharist. The wine-water controversy provides the key to why the Roman canon says “this potent [i.e. alcoholic/spiritually inebriating] cup”—meaning wine. The vessel is plainly not the focus; its contents are. In English, the word “cup” can refer to both the vessel and what it contains. Not so “chalice.” You can drink from a chalice, but you cannot “drink a chalice.” If you are talking about the contents of the vessel, “cup” is the only word that works.

See the full table of contents here.