It is impossible to love both the victors and the vanquished, as the Iliad does, except from the place, outside the world, where God’s Wisdom dwells. Published originally during the Second World War, Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force and Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad are two of the last century’s finest discussions [...]
Bernard Iddings Bell Bernard Iddings Bell (1886-1958) wrote several controversial books examining the American way of life. These fine little books attracted considerable attention, many of them beginning as articles in the New York Times Magazine, Commonweal, and the Atlantic Monthly. By 1950 Bell, an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, was known [...]
Susan Srigley brings to the fiction of Flannery O’Connor what others have not: a truly Catholic frame of reference informed by Thomas Aquinas. In her study of the South’s preeminent fictionist, Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art, Susan Srigley reconsiders three of Flannery O’Connor’s most significant figures: Hazel Motes, Francis Tarwater, and Ruby Turpin. The former are, [...]
Published originally during the Second World War, Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” and Rachel Bespaloff’s “On the Iliad” are two of the last century’s finest discussions of Western literature’s preeminent epic. The former, said Elizabeth Hardwick, “is one of the most moving and original literary essays ever written.” The other, wrote [...]
Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls. By Peter Augustine Lawler. ISI Books. In Aliens in America, Peter Augustine Lawler argues convincingly, if disturbingly, that Americans, having been seduced by the latest manifestations of philosophical nominalism and by the new utopianism of biotechnology, are blindly and in dangerously large numbers opting to be [...]
The test of enduring literary merit begins and ends with abiding questions something like these: Does the given work look from the standpoint of eternity at material things and transitory wants? Does it function as a medium for apprehending unchanging truths? Does it plumb the depths of being “with an intelligence.” Why Literature Matters: Permanence [...]
The Church and the Land, by Fr. Vincent McNabb. Few in our time have heard of Father Vincent McNabb—Irishman, Dominican theologian, leading light among the Distributists, and man of paradigmatic character. Nor would many today relish what he had to say if, by some chance encounter, they were introduced to one or more of his thirty [...]