Works of Mercy

By |2023-03-29T18:58:00-05:00November 12th, 2022|Categories: Books, Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, Fiction, Senior Contributors|

Sally Thomas' "Works of Mercy" is a lovely, quiet novel, in which the style, tone, and content fit together like hand in glove. The author’s understated, personal, poetic style reminded me of the novels of Susan Hill or Barbara Pym—both novelists who dwell within the world of feminine emotions without being indulgent, sentimental, or quaint. [...]

Let the Violent Bear It Away

By |2023-08-02T21:53:45-05:00September 13th, 2022|Categories: Dwight Longenecker, Fiction, Flannery O'Connor, Literature, Senior Contributors|

Flannery O’Connor clearly has a soft spot for her Southern religious freaks. She sees in their insanity the germ of genuine belief, and recognizes in them an antidote to the bland, uniform indoctrination into a culture where materialistic atheism is the assumed worldview. In her short stories, and culminating in The Violent Bear It Away—her [...]

Nobody With a Good Car Needs to Be Justified

By |2022-08-31T18:35:25-05:00August 31st, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, Fiction, Flannery O'Connor, Literature, Senior Contributors|

In Flannery O’Connor’s "Wise Blood," the Church of preacher Hazel Motes is a Church of Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. It is a Church Without Christ because no redeemer is needed. Is this not what the majority of twenty-first century Christianity has become? In re-reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood I’m struck by the prophetic precision with which [...]

Nobody Cares About the Doom of Númenor

By |2022-08-20T19:07:00-05:00August 19th, 2022|Categories: Fiction, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature|

From police procedurals to fantasy extravaganzas, genre fiction often struggles to balance the appeal of its subject matter with the demands of storytelling. Smaller, self-contained novels that artfully suggest a world beyond their pages are usually more successful than broad, sweeping epics that try to cram in every single thing. According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Rings [...]

Ernst Jünger’s “The Glass Bees” & Our Dystopian Present

By |2022-08-17T16:22:26-05:00August 17th, 2022|Categories: Civil Society, Fiction, Literature, Science, Technology|

In our protean age of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and virtual reality, Ernst Jünger’s uncanny vision of a dystopian world dominated by the machinations of high tech seems strikingly prescient. “The secret force behind technology appears to be the intention to make things insipid. The flower without fragrance is its emblem.” ~Nicolás Gómez Dávila When Ernst [...]

C.S. Lewis for Grown-Ups

By |2022-07-22T14:38:12-05:00July 19th, 2022|Categories: Books, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Fiction, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Senior Contributors|

It is only by freeing ourselves from our possessiveness of others that we can avoid being possessed by the false “loves” that keep us from True Love. In his adult fiction, as in his children’s fiction and his non-fiction, C.S. Lewis teaches this priceless lesson, the learning of which is necessary if adults want to [...]

Where Is Catholic Fiction?

By |2021-09-11T11:38:58-05:00September 11th, 2021|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Culture War, Dwight Longenecker, Fiction, Senior Contributors|

In the realm of Catholic fiction, there is a great divide between popular fiction and that which attempts to be timeless literature. The former is good entertainment that takes place in a Catholic universe and incarnates Catholic themes; the second is at times overly didactic and even clumsily allegorical. The great literature successfully melds the [...]

Why You Should Re-Read “The Great Gatsby”

By |2021-04-27T20:07:04-05:00April 26th, 2021|Categories: Fiction, Great Books, Literature|

A good story is worth revisiting. Such beauty requires multiple attempts at comprehension. One must keep coming back, keep expecting more, keep hoping for one more prolonged moment of imagination. And “The Great Gatsby” certainly deserves a re-read. F. Scott Fitzgerald Rosaria Butterfield once said, “Christians aren’t just readers. Christians are re-readers.”[1] This [...]

A Mother’s Tale: Hilda van Stockum’s “The Winged Watchman”

By |2021-03-25T12:03:45-05:00March 26th, 2021|Categories: Books, Catholicism, David Deavel, Fiction, Senior Contributors, World War II|

The sharp focus on Mrs. Verhagen gives “The Winged Watchman,” Hilda van Stockum’s novel about a Dutch family during World War II, such power. The close-up tasks of the women are just as heroic as the tasks of the men who often fought to protect their loved ones. Who knew a great war story would [...]

Tom Joad and the Quest for an American Eden

By |2020-12-28T14:26:45-06:00December 28th, 2020|Categories: American Republic, Fiction, Literature, Mark Malvasi, Senior Contributors|

In the course of telling the story of a people and a country in “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck offers an unforgettable evaluation of the American desire to enter the Promised Land. But Steinbeck’s garden is Eden after the fall dominated by the expectation of hardship, suffering, and death. In such a world, men [...]

Flaubert’s Fictional Faith

By |2020-11-14T09:49:27-06:00November 14th, 2020|Categories: Beauty, Catholicism, Christianity, Faith, Fiction, Literature|

Although Gustave Flaubert professed to be a mystic who believed in nothing, in “A Simple Heart,” he gives us an unironic portrait of guileless faith that melds the hagiographer’s preoccupation with sanctity with the modern fictionist’s oblique incorporation of symbols. In so doing, the professed atheist purifies the cynical soul. Since doubt was carried into [...]

Timelessness and “Times Square”

By |2023-06-16T11:36:05-05:00November 8th, 2020|Categories: Books, Fiction, Joseph Pearce, Literature, Senior Contributors, Time|

“Times Square and Other Stories” by William Baer, a man and writer who is truly alive in the presence of the past, is storytelling at its best, both compelling and contemplative. Those who take up this volume will be changed for the better by the reading of it. Times Square and Other Stories, by William [...]

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