Arts & Letters
A selection of recent articles on this topic
Modernist Enchantment
Olivier Messiaen:A Critical Biographyby robert shollreaktion, 208 pages, $35 In May 1988, just under four years before…
Divorce in the Gospels
Remarriage in Early Christianityby A. Andrew DasEerdmans, 384 pages, $49.99 The translation of Biblical texts requires both…
Jordan Peterson’s “God”
We Who Wrestle with God:Perceptions of the Divineby Jordan B. PetersonPortfolio, 576 pages, $35 A man who disbelieved…
Maimonides for Today
The Guide to the Perplexed:A New Translationby moses maimonides, translated and with commentary by lenn e. goodman…
Iain McGilchrist’s New Era
Once, the story goes, man stood at the center of the universe. He looked in the mirror…
Books for Christmas—2024
A friend told me recently that bookstores were making something of a comeback. I hope that’s true,…
What Conclave Yearns For
The pope is dead. Sede vacante. From the round earth’s imagined corners come the 120 cardinal-electors, the progressive…
Get Out of Your Slippers
For many people, the Covid pandemic lockdown meant “the triumph of fear and the paradoxical enjoyment of…
Spontaneous Loss
Those early weeks, you could have been anyone, Too young for fingerprints, much less a name,And years…
Disintegrating England
The English Soul:Faith of a Nationby peter ackroydreaktion books, 416 pages, $30 Peter Ackroyd is a major…
Letters – December 2024
Still Breathing I appreciated Matthew Burdette’s insights into “Progressive Supersessionism” (October 2024), drawing out continuities between today’s…
Lady Scrooges
I noticed it last Christmas: It’s the women who really hate Ebenezer Scrooge. In the opening scene of…
Apophatic
Not with the myth and phosphorus of metaphor. Notwith lines of force looped in true-love knots.Not by…
Heresy Costs
About one-third of the way into Nick Cave’s Southern Gothic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989), the…
Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky at 75
The Sheltering Sky begins with one protagonist opening his eyes and ends with another refusing to open…
