Every spoken word was a pilgrim, in some sense, passing through the valley of the shadow of death.

Lauren Spohn ponders death from the dentist’s chair

Is it possible to critique secularism in a thoroughly secular age?

Ali Harfouch on alienation and the sublime

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in March 2024 on our modern life.

Entering the Pickle was also an unusual experience… a fact that the inscription “Step high, speak low, and leave your dignity behind” emblazoned on its front door… cheekily acknowledged.

Elysia Balavage on a bohemian pillar of the Chicago Renaissance

McLuhan sees our modern, technologically induced condition as a product of tensions between individualism and tribalism.

Éamon Brennan contests a standard reading of Marshall McLuhan

Scruton, looking at our days “sub specie aeternitatis,” even thinks that this time of decay gives us an opportunity to work on the behalf of religion, morality, and culture that “no previous generation has been granted, and which no future generation may desire.”

Julian Kwasniewski reviews Against the Tide

[T]rue liberal education aims at a holistic understanding of truth, a universal knowledge in which, as Saint John Henry Newman puts it, all branches of learning connect.

Kate Whitaker on her liberal arts education

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in February on our modern life.

Lunn’s story illustrates the reality that one need not choose between being a “modern” and “classical” mountain enthusiast or between being an inventor or follower of tradition.

Margaret Sutton on the “something else“ we find in the mountains

David Morrison offers a scientific deep-dive on networks of change

For more seasoned readers, these chapters also uncover the feline motifs that, like medieval marginalia, are everywhere on the edges of this history but have mostly escaped notice until now.

Caroline Hovanec reviews Marx for Cats

Do bioethicists actually change minds?

An interview with Michael Deem

[Frost’s] theories of “sentence sounds” and “sound-posture” insisted that tone and spoken vocal inflection­–how words sound when we say them–should be the material of poetry, a poetic paradigm which was perfectly suited to performance.

Isabelle Stuart on the history of modern poetry recordings

There have been drastic changes in how poetry sounds to readers over the last hundred and fifty years, troubling the illusion that reading silently can offer us access to the poem as it sounded to the writer.

Isabelle Stuart on the history of modern poetry recordings

An interview with Samuel Hazo, founder of the International Poetry Forum

The absence of poetry from our daily discourse and our public life leaves a total vacuum because there is no substitute for it.

Samuel Hazo on the relevance of poetry for modern life

It is in the world of the incarnate word that we find our true selves, and it is the imagination that takes us there.

Samuel Hazo on the relevance of poetry for modern life

Most of what we do or make, for good or ill, originates in the imagination.

Samuel Hazo on the relevance of poetry for modern life

What I suggest is we have attributed intellectual deficiencies to Pollyanna as a character that she does not possess in Porter’s books because they align with our changing cultural paradigms about optimism.

LuElla D’Amico revisits an icon of childhood literature

Much ink has been spilled on whether Amrita Sher-Gil’s work was “modernist” or “realist,” Eastern or Western, modern or traditional.

Vaishnavi Patil offers a fresh reading of Amrita Sher-Gil