The great American poet and critic Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was sometimes mistaken for a Catholic, though he himself just barely owned to being a “theist,” and he deemed even that modest statement an “unfortunate” admission. […]
The other night, I watched a few minutes of the comedian Ricky Gervais’s new comedy show. Early in, he does a bit about his atheism and his willingness nonetheless to abide expressions of religious devotion. […]
The poet, literary biographer, and Catholic spiritual writer, Paul Mariani published his last book of poems, Ordinary Time, in 2019. Much of it written in the aftermath of his recovery from a brain tumor, the […]
A young Virginian well versed in folk, blues, and country music, but recognizing Catholic “prayers and melodies just from [his] scant / neighborliness with the Episcopal Church / as a child,” for some reason begins […]
For the Catholic Church, America has never been just a nation or a state. It constitutes rather a political and theological problem. That is as much the case now as it has ever been. The […]
As the medieval poet Dante Alighieri ascends the mountain of purgatory, in the second canticle of his great poem, The Divine Comedy, he arrives as the terrace of the envious. There, those who took pleasure […]
I recently paid tribute to the poet Claude McKay, a singular figure in American literature. He was the first great poet of the Harlem Renaissance who inspired a generation. After a late-life conversion, in 1944, […]
I would like to recall a scene of almost two decades past. I was in my first year of doctoral work and was studying, at home on a bright Sunday afternoon. I found myself reflecting […]
Paul Mariani is in the most admirable sense a confessional poet. For more than fifty years, he taught modern poetry at various colleges, including the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and then, Boston College. He authored […]
Editor’s note: The following essay is a summary of an address given at Martin Saints Classical High School, in May 2019. ——– Modern education as we have known it for a century now tries to […]
© Catholic World Report