A golfer’s long game has nothing to do with the amount of time it takes to play eighteen holes. It’s the part of his game that has to do with distance shots—what he does with a driver or a 3-iron, for example. In football, the long game is about the passes that get the most [...]
The question of Homer’s existence is a little like the question of God’s. There, unquestionably, like the universe, are the Iliad and the Odyssey: But how did they come to be there? Were they composed by a single author, or were they gradually pieced together, as the classicist Richard Bentley said in 1713, from “a [...]
Toward the end of her life, Flannery O’Connor was often asked to speak about being a Southerner, as though this were a peculiar condition in need of explanation. In “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” a composite essay published from two of her last public talks, she sums up what she thinks of her [...]
Last year when Dr. Kevin Roberts and I first met with the senior class in a course we were co-teaching, Dr. Roberts asked what was on their minds, and one of them said that he had never understood why the students at Wyoming Catholic College have to memorize poems every semester in Humanities. This response was [...]
The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, eds., ISI Books. A year ago, when my wife and I were waiting for a flight out of Logan Airport, a roughhewn man of about 60 was sitting a few seats away from us reading a book I would have been surprised [...]