About Gregory Wolfe

Gregory Wolfe is the editor of Slant Books. He was the founder and editor of Image Journal and author of Beauty Will Save the World. He was formerly the Di­rec­tor of the Seat­tle Pa­cific Uni­ver­sity MFA in Creative Writing Program and writer in residence at Seattle Pacific University.

Discerning the Spirits: Gerhart Niemeyer as Culture Critic

By |2020-02-27T14:33:40-06:00March 4th, 2020|Categories: Art, Christian Humanism, Culture, Gerhart Niemeyer, Gregory Wolfe, Literature, Philosophy|

With Aristotle, Gerhart Niemeyer saw art as being closer to philosophy than to history. Like philosophy, art begins and ends in wonder—it promotes a deeper sense of the mystery that bounds our experience. In the great works of art and literature, the relationship between art and religion is that of a seamless garment, and not [...]

Beauty Will Save the World

By |2021-05-26T16:53:32-05:00December 10th, 2017|Categories: Art, Beauty, Books, Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Imagination, Modernity, Religion, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays|

If art cannot save our souls, it can do much to redeem the time, to give us a true image of ourselves, both in the horror and the boredom to which we can descend, and in the glory which we may, in rare moments, be privileged to glimpse. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series [...]

Conservatism & the Politicization of Culture

By |2019-10-30T11:48:03-05:00July 18th, 2017|Categories: Beauty, Conservatism, Hope|

Conservatives must once again put contemplation before action, or else their energies will be wasted. They cannot continue to trim the upper branches of politics while the roots of culture wither and die from inattention… There is an aspect to the conservative abandonment of culture I find distressing: the increasing politicization within the conservative movement. [...]

Thanatos Syndrome: Life and Death Matters

By |2016-07-26T15:28:42-05:00July 29th, 2013|Categories: Books, Christianity, Gregory Wolfe, Walker Percy|Tags: , , |

Review of The Thanatos Syndrome, by Walker Percy. In spite of his six widely read novels, his two works of nonfiction (with their original contributions to the study of language and the human psyche), and his two national literary awards, Walker Percy remains a figure on the fringes of the American literary establishment. When he [...]

Flannery O’Connor: Mystery & Metaphor

By |2019-07-23T15:04:03-05:00March 25th, 2013|Categories: Books, Christianity, Featured, Flannery O'Connor, Gregory Wolfe, Literature, South|Tags: , , |

Flannery O’Connor Flannery O’Connor and the Language of Apocalypse, by Edward Kessler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys, edited by C. Ralph Stephens. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. A recent review in the New York Times employed the phrase, the Flannery O’Connor industry,” in [...]

Conservatism and the Therapeutic Society

By |2016-02-12T15:28:36-06:00October 4th, 2012|Categories: Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Gregory Wolfe, Ideology, Religion|Tags: , |

Conservatives active in the business of influencing public policy have been giving increasing attention in recent years to the idea that politics is ultimately an epiphenomenon of culture. What these activists have recognized is that political mobilization and efficiently produced position papers by themselves will not effect lasting change in the way we are governed. [...]

Beauty Will Save the World

By |2016-06-14T09:42:59-05:00July 21st, 2012|Categories: Art, Beauty, Christianity, Conservatism, Gregory Wolfe|Tags: , |

Toward the end of my undergraduate days, I came across a passage in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture which I found startling and even a bit disturbing. Solzhenitsyn begins his address on the nature and role of literature with a brief, enigmatic quotation from Dostoevsky: “Beauty will save the world.” Solzhenitsyn confesses that the phrase had [...]

Beauty Will Save the World-A Recommendation

By |2017-07-18T14:47:09-05:00June 2nd, 2011|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Books, Gregory Wolfe, W. Winston Elliott III|Tags: |

An excerpt from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture found in Beauty Will Save the World  (by Gregory Wolfe): Dostoevsky once enigmatically let drop the phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time I thought it merely a phrase. Was such a thing possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did beauty [...]

A Guide to the Thought of Eric Voegelin

By |2017-06-26T16:39:13-05:00February 23rd, 2011|Categories: Eric Voegelin, Gregory Wolfe, Politics|Tags: , |

Eric Voegelin’s Search For Order In History, edited by Stephen A. McKnight. In the spring of 1953, Time magazine published a long review-essay entitled “Journalism and Joachim’s Children.” The book reviewed was The New Science of Politics, written by an Austrian émigré scholar named Eric Voegelin. Voegelin, the essay claimed, had made a significant breakthrough [...]

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