I “Verse is dressed up that has nowhere to go,” the poet critic John Wain once said in one of his own verses, “Apology for Understatement.” I thought of the line the other day when […]
I In an essay entitled “The Truth about the Past” (1988), which the mediaevalist R.W. Southern (1912-2000) delivered to the St. John’s College Historical Society, he pointed out that it was not until 1850 that […]
In Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (1987), Jerrold Northrop Moore wrote of the earliest musical formation of the great English composer and, indeed, all children: Before birth, in the dark womb, the baby’s first consciousness […]
“Catholic thought must be raised up with Jesus between heaven and earth and it has been asked to work at the reconciliation of the world to the truth by living out the painful paradox of […]
In his incomparable biography of Samuel Johnson, Boswell recounts that while the poet, critic, essayist, and lexicographer was researching his Lives of the Poets (1781), the last of his great literary projects, “the tranquility of […]
A new EWTN film about the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) seeks to introduce the unique nineteenth-century Victorian-era writer to a wider audience. The film was made by Dr. Andrew Nash, who […]
In 1864, in response to the novelist Charles Kingsley’s allegation in Macmillan’s Magazine that “Truth for its own sake was never a virtue with the Roman clergy” and that “Father Newman informs us that it […]
“Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” — John 11:40 “I set myself down to write with a Heart depressed with the Melancholy Scenes around me,” […]
Now that the presidential election nears, many of us in the Catholic world are pondering how Catholic interests will make themselves heard in the contest. Yet in pondering these matters, many Catholics are coming to […]
To speak of the saint in John Henry Newman is to speak of a man who gave his entire adult life not only to embodying heroic virtue himself but guiding others to embody it as […]
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