Fiction

An Annunciation on the Battlefield

It is the encounter with beauty, all-consuming beauty, the infinite, which directs the human soul back to God. The sky calls us up; the earth drags us down... On December 2, 1805, the French Emperor...

Jane Austen Forever!

Pick up a Jane Austen novel, and you will discover that behind the long gowns and country dances, people in her era struggled with the same weaknesses we struggle with today. Well-written stories like Austen's bring to life the human drama that is played out in every...

“The End of the Cold War”

“Why can’t we eat normal food?” Frank moved the fried tempeh, steamed broccoli, and brown rice around on his plate with his dinner fork, much like the eight-year-old boy he was forty years ago. His wife’s jaw...

The Return of Storytelling in a Digital Age

Podcast stories, like reading, have the advantage of engaging the audience’s imagination. And lest the technophobes among us decry the dominance of gadgets, rather than the gadgetry taking us into a brave new world, the technology is actually allowing us to participate in a much older form of literature:...

“The Unfortunate Fate of Septimus Wise”: A Ghost Story

The young man intended to purchase my death and, presumably and in some manner carry it away so that I never would meet with it. Immortality, wealth, my beloved Jessica all rotated in kaleidoscopic vision before my eyes...

“The Wedding Knell”

The whole scene expressed the vain struggle of the gilded vanities of this world, when opposed to age, infirmity, sorrow, and death... There is a certain church in the city of New York which I have always...

The Best of Contemporary Christian Fiction

In my last essay for The Imaginative Conservative, I offered a panoramic survey of the best of contemporary Christian literature, both poetry and prose. As a follow-up, I’d like to recommend twelve works of contemporary Christian...

Should We Be Teaching 21st-Century Literature?

For many years I taught a course in Twentieth-Century Literature to college seniors. In truth it was actually a course in early to mid-twentieth-century literature because I didn’t teach any text published within the previous forty to...

Proper Matches, Romantic Elopements, & True Love in Jane Austen’s Novels

Jane Austen’s heroines live, choose, and marry according to the highest wisdom about love that is ruled by principle, not convention—by the prudent mind, pure heart, and informed conscience rather than by the false prudence of the world preoccupied by money, image, lust, or self-interest...

Utopian Fantasies vs. Real Happiness in Samuel Johnson’s “Rasselas”

In Samuel Johnson's novel Rasselas, the eponymous character discovers that happiness does not derive from a beautiful place, luxurious palace, or constant entertainment, but depends upon a composed state of mind in possession of truth... Throughout the...

Apocalyptic Visions: Faith, Reason, & Science Fiction

The apocalyptic vision in science fiction is akin to the memento mori in mediaeval art. It reminds us of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. And these last things remind us of the first things—most importantly the primary reality that we are made in...

“A Bloody Habit”: The Story of a Vampire-Slaying Priest

Where are the Flannery O’Connors and Evelyn Waughs of our day, who can be witty about wickedness and plant their theology in the thicket of character, the turns of a plot, and the twist of a knife? Where are the writers who can be both entertaining and...

W.H. Auden’s Tolkien

W.H. Auden realized that J.R.R. Tolkien’s greatness was not simply the result of a capacity for the fantastic, but rather that it relied just as much on his scholarly acumen as on his imagination... W.H. Auden...

Future Shock: Notes for a Novel I’ll Never Write

Here's the scenario: As the culture of death destroys itself in its auto-cannibalistic self-consumption, millions begin to flock to the Faith. In the very death throes of decadence, Christ and His Church rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes... I have...