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

We are not built to live in the way barbarism trains us to live, whence the widespread unhappiness and dissatisfaction of technologically advanced nations.

Brian Harding on Michel Henry, social media, and the loss of interiority

A Podcast interview with Brad Gregory on the sciences, Christianity, and way history shapes us.

Girard is not only an academic theorist but a veritable agent of culture who has shaped the thinking of writers around the world…. But where there is influence, there is also the potential for anxiety.

Trevor Merrill on novel writing after Girard

To my surprise, I found Pope Francis a medievalist, St. Francis an eco-theologian, and a papal encyclical a work of literary ecocriticism.

Kathryn Mogk Wagner on medieval studies and ecocriticism

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 on our modern life.

In telling a story that accounts for sovereignty, we can think through the possibility of a politics without sovereignty and the implications that such a politics would have on liberatory politics

Ali S. Harfouch on modernity, Islam, and second creators

Neither limited to nor ignorant of the important but circumscribed sphere of domestic life, the finest women’s writing highlight the ways in which private and public life intersect, overlap, and coinhere.

Katy Carl on Virginia Woolf and Sigrid Undset

Time collapses on itself as Romeo’s lingering warmth betrays the truth of his death. He lived only moments ago. And now, Juliet is only moments away from ending her own time in this world.

Krystal Marsh on the warmth of lips

What’s different about this idea, from either Claudel or Maritain, is that poetry does not call into being through naming: it finds.

Tom Break on Anna Key’s poetry and what art does

Jansenist Orientalism, a sub-species of ‘Catholic Orientalism,’ matters as a French tributary to religious modernity as such—the overlooked contribution of a prominent if persecuted minority.

Richard Yoder on Orientalism in early modernity

The possibility of an event, of perceiving a thing in the difficulty of what it is to be, of a momentary vision with an other-worldly value, is necessarily predicated on a certain degree of silence.

Tom Break on patience and contemplation

Something happened between Proust's early efforts and his mature masterpiece, a paradigm shift that made the author capable of transferring his legendary gifts as a comic dinner-table raconteur 'onto the page.'

Trevor Merrill on Proust’s conversion

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.

Something, outside of human reason, outside of human meaning and of human feeling, has reached him. “The bird sings.” And the speaker hears it.

Tom Break on hearing goodness in being

Machiavelli follows Augustine by demythologizing violence, stripping it of the gloss of legend and heroism. He departs from him by adding that it is necessary, excusable, and worthy of imitation.

Brian Harding on violence and political reality

Every aspect of our existence is shot through with value, and it is inconceivable to think outside of this value-replete framework. So, how do we fit in an unmade world, in a world devoid of value?

Tom Break on art, value, and a meaningless world

Perhaps the task of history, so like that of the Gospel, is to disquiet the living with a persistent presence that rises from the dead.

Richard Yoder reflects on Jansenism and the Refusal of Sacraments controversy

Anyone who has sought to make or comprehend art has probably come across at least a few lessons on beauty—insights that, it seems, can never be exhausted.

Trevor Merrill on lodestars of aesthetic judgement

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 January on our modern life.