Contentment requires that one appreciate the good things in life.... We should view reality with a loving, contemplative gaze, as if we were looking at the Rowan Tree.

Xavier Symons reviews the film Living as an antidote to modern malaise

This interplay of death and eros produces a flight of words in Ulysses which signals our fundamental need to give birth to beauty—not simply in the body of another, but in eternity.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on love and death in Joyce’s writing

Del Noce supplies a crucial element lacking in the filmmaker: a transcendental perspective from which to begin the work of restoring life to society and the political community.

Matthew Scarince on The Crisis of Modernity and Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano

Manjot Kaur’s work creates new stories for a new world and to animate humans to interact with non-humans in ways we have never imagined.

Vaishnavi Patil on artistic genealogies of mythology in South Asia and new tales for the modern world

To feel the expression of ‘Mache dich’ is to be compelled to reflect—to think in time, and to listen in time. Bach creates patterns of expectation, weaving them together, and generating further shapes.

Stephane Crayton on "St Matthew’s Passion"

‘Tongue-in-cheek’ as it may be, but it conveys a Christian soteriology: through Christ’s sacrifice, death does not have the last word; and that mercy and love should extend to all.

Victoria Costa on Sir James MacMillan’s ‘St John Passion’

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