A little more than two years ago, I wrote my first regular column here at Catholic World Report, and it was about work. I was reflecting on a trip I took to England as part […]
“Reality is not just what we see,” Sarah Cortez told me in a recent interview for the Ignatius Press podcast. “For me, as a poet,” she elaborated, “my vocation or calling is to try to bring the […]
F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu is a landmark of early cinema, memorialized in the Catholic world by its inclusion on the 1995 Vatican Film List. In the opening title card, the film calls itself “a symphony […]
French novelist, poet, and critic Michel Houellebecq is a pessimist and a controversialist. He is also a realist, and in his latest novel, Annihilation, he writes, “However much one might despise, or even hate, one’s […]
There is a lot to like about Pope Francis’ recent letter “On the Role of Literature in Formation”. Originally conceived as an encouragement for seminarians to include fiction and poetry as part of their education, […]
In 2016, the legendary Japanese animator and filmmaker Hayo Miyazaki was invited to watch an AI-generated sequence, engineered by young computer animators. The images were of grotesque, writhing figures, which the creators imagined “could be […]
A few years ago, Beth Gibbons decided to learn Polish. That is, she learned enough Polish to perform Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”) with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki. As […]
In the new movie Wildcat, a feverish and immobile Mary Flannery O’Connor, played by Maya Hawke, asks her parish priest, played by Liam Neeson, whether he has ever read James Joyce. He admits he has not, […]
On February 25, a twenty-five-year-old member of the United States Air Force named Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in a gruesome public suicide spectacle outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. Proclaiming “Free Palestine” […]
Whit Stillman’s cult classic Metropolitan is an elegy for the haute bourgeoisie, the well-educated upper subdivision of the middle class that once set the cultural tone for liberal Western nations. Released in 1990, Stillman’s film […]
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