Through Peter’s silence hope is granted access to his despairing heart. Through silence ‘La Pasión’ is granted access to the audience, transforming the hearts that listen.

Victoria Costa on Golijov’s musical presentation of Peter’s betrayal.

Informed by Pärt’s own spirituality, ‘Passio’ participates in a wider musical exploration of Peter as emblematic of a fallenness redeemed and restored in relationship with God.

Victoria Costa on Arvo Pärt and Peter’s denial of Christ

Reading her poetry, one follows Pinkerton’s journey away from Eros and the self through prayer and philosophy and the contemplation of existence, time, the physical world, and faith.

Mary Grace Mangano’s review of Helen Pinkerton’s poems

Kher promotes more fluid conceptions of genealogy, encouraging viewers to consider that ancestry goes beyond the markers of culture, race, and ethnicity.

Vaishnavi Patil on Bharti Kher’s Ancestor and imaging motherhood

If tradition is a socially embodied argument extended through time, then Willa Cather and Simone Weil’s quarrel with the boosters of the Gothic exemplifies faithfulness to the traditions of Christian sacred architecture.

Jonathan McGregor on tradition versus traditionalism

The death, decay, and melancholy found in the ruins of our fallen world wither against the evergreen flower of our suffering God.

Michael McCarthy on the deepening relevance of Brideshead Revisited

A type of secular self-enclosure partaking in characteristics both pagan and Christian, trollish and monkish, stoic and saintly: a synthesis that registers as curiously incomplete.

Katy Carl on genealogies of selfhood

Muffled beneath the sounds of contemporary American life, the discerning reader will hear the reverberations of a question posed to Jesus: ‘And who is my neighbor?’

Charles Ducey on Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch

Modern American viewers seem to suffer from the same bias as The Gilded Age characters themselves: if it isn’t the English way, it isn’t anything at all.

Jacob Martin on Julian Fellows’s newest television series

Is life a gift? Or a calamity? Is existence to be affirmed, or avoided? The answer to those questions may very well depend on what you think about the possibility of forgiveness.

Jeffrey Wald reviews Johua Hren’s novel Infinite Regress

She found herself alone with God, in her garden, religiously unaffiliated and sacrificially loved... She likely never partook in the Eucharist that she wrote about so lovingly.

Luella D’Amico on Emily Dickinson as precursor to the ‘nones’

If you give your soul to the enterprise, for the sake of your desire to live a meaningful life beyond its reach, you might be rewarded with the blessing of forgetting that such a life was ever possible.

Daniel Cunningham on the neoliberal wager

A cultural product of its time, its value is more anthropological than literary. In an ideological age, what do secular, educated parents most want to believe about their kids?

Maya Sinha on parenting and literature in Powers and O’Connor

Both films concede that technology shapes the future, but the determining factor in the life of heroes and of nations still seems to be not the gun or the plane, but the person behind the trigger.

Lauren Spohn on heroes and technological determinism

Both Maverick and Skyfall encourage us to read the life of the nation in the life of the hero... When we talk about the course of the hero’s life, we’re also talking about history.

Lauren Spohn reflects on similarities between James Bond and Maverick

It is this backward glance, careful and sustained, at who we used to be, that will give us back the image of who we are now and what possibilities the future might hold.

Kirsten Hall considers the appeal of the 18th century and “2001: A Space Odyssey”

Porter narrates how the things we choose to notice reflect the people we become… She encourages readers to pay attention to the warning signs that could lead to our own fates if we fail to keep watch.

Casie Dodd recovers Porter as a Catholic writer

Our life is fuller and lovelier for variety. At one moment we might need Lizzo, at another Liszt, but ultimately both, or their like, should find their ways into our lives and into our playlists.

Jacob Martin on Richard Straus’s opera and diverse cultural experiences

We inheritors of the Cartesian dream believe that if we had enough knowledge, we could know the past and the future and could banish the fictions which for a hundred millennia have spelled our ruin.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on James Joyce and Thornton Wilder

If the fiction writer accepts the imitative laws of human interaction, then Rene Girard’s mimetic theory puts him in a tricky spot.

Trevor Merrill on writers and the problem of mimetic desire