Friendship with God—it is a laughable postmodern literary idea. But for post-postmodernity, is there anything worth pursuing more?

Jeffrey Wald reviews books by Catholic writers Joshua Wren and Trevor Merrill

Lexi Eikelboom argues, in a new way, that theology always begins from these most ordinary places, driving us deeper into such moments instead of out and away from them.

Lyle Enright explores the impact of taking rhythm seriously

This back-and-forth will grow and stretch and change and, somehow, we will recognize that we have been caught up together in another, greater boundedness all along.

Lyle Enright reviews Lexi Eikelboom’s Rhythm: A Theological Category

Toeing the line between sincere homage and raucous parody, The Rake’s Progress is a complex opera, one that evinces sincere ambivalence toward its source material, but above all, delight.

Jacob Martin reviews a transhistorical operatic masterpiece

The old ways have not died. Enchantment remains. The very soul of baseball seems up for grabs, with mystery, enchantment, and superstition on the one hand, and science, disenchantment, and statistics on the other.

Jeffrey Waldon on Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

In the parallel spiritual journeys of its characters, Endo’s The Samurai reflects a typically postmodern yearning for transcendence and synthesis of values beyond the conflict of cultures.

Katy Carl on Shūsaku Endō’s The Samurai and finding transcendence beyond the postmodern

Three recent action films—Kingsman: Secret Service, Avengers: Infinity War, and Tenet—face down climate change by pointing to a supposedly new threat: a new crop of Malthusians, out to exterminate parts of the human race for the greater good.

Brice Ezell on the persistence of a bad idea.

What is remarkable about Hagia Sophia’s transformations is the ways in which it was architecturally transformed in line with the politico-spatial turning points in the region’s history… These architectural changes have the power to reinforce, and even ignite, historical change.

Emre Çetin Gürer maps the space of historical change in the Hagia Sophia

Food can have a transportive quality that can transcend where or when you are and take you somewhere and sometime else. However, food’s histories and transcendent qualities are never only personal.

Krystal Marsh eats her way across history

The term ‘folk opera’ draws attention to Hadestown’s connection with other Orphean music dramas, placing it in a genealogy with earlier operas that take the myth of Orpheus as their subject.

Jacob Martin follows Orpheus’s song through the ages

The pandemic has made many acutely aware of the absence or presence of solitude in one’s life—in crowded households, its paucity, and in bachelor pads, its excess.

Suzannah Cady reviews A History of Solitude

This absurdity is at the heart of what makes the film profound. “The Happening” depicts our impaired ability to grapple with that which fails to make logical, rational sense.

Katherine Kurtz watches the The Happening for guidance in 2020.

Here is the simple truth on which Dickens has founded his Tale, a truth that still resonates today. It is still the best of times, still the worst of times, but there is no time that cannot be redeemed by love.

Dwight Lindley finds a stark decision in Charles Dickens.

My father’s obituary was simple. It read, ‘Charles D. Marsh/Garretson, 53, a lifelong resident of Jersey City passed away on May 3rd, 2020, at Hoboken University Hospital.’

Krystal Marsh on genealogies, Shakespeare, and memory.

This is something I can trust. Something I can give myself to, because in giving myself to it I don’t abandon my judgment, or foreswear my world. I set my eyes to work. I look into the painting. I look for how it shows itself to me. And I try to see what truth can be found there.

Tom Break on the hard road to truth.

Making oneself look at the painting becomes a forcible quieting of the mind. And because the work requires looking with attention, what you see, at the end of the looking, you see consciously.

Tom Break traces spiritual art from Abbot Suger to Ad Reinhardt.

Coronavirus limitations actually present American orchestras with an excellent opportunity to explore music that American audiences rarely hear and to experiment with both old and new ways to perform classical music.

Jacob Martin looks for new paths for orchestral music.

Two containers with a temple complex: a ship and a mailbox. Both drip with blood drawn in white heat of colonial suspicions of rebellion and rights to autonomy.

Maggie Slaughter exposes colonialism and orientalism in a mailbox and a passenger ship

Franz kneels before the priest. It is nighttime and the cell is utterly dark save for one luminous candle. This is the light that shines in the darkness. And the darkness cannot overcome it.

Jeffrey Wald examines the power of cinema in the modern world.

Perhaps there’s another way of understanding what’s at issue in the western tradition—not a narrative but an ethos; not a straightforward story of development but an idea that resurges in the history of western art and reaches a kind of fever pitch in the modernist project.

Tom Break rethinks modern art’s relationship with the western art tradition