Note: The following remarks were delivered at the 2024 Napa Institute. In late March of 2018, early one morning, my wife told me that she was pregnant with our fifth child. He would be our […]
About midway into his fifth and most recent book of poems, Outside the Gates of Eden, David Middleton prints an elegy for the late Louisiana naturalist Caroline Dormon. There, he speaks of his “early poems,” […]
One of the more obscure chapters in American literary history is the role Catholicism played in the development of southern letters. Everyone knows of the Georgia fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor, who remains the best-known American […]
Marly Youmans’ new story in verse begins with an invocation of all that the world has forgotten, or tried to forget, in the name of being “realistic.” The first lines run as follows: The wildwood […]
Let me begin by sharing two observations, one made by me, the other by the poet Dana Gioia. The first is this. Some years ago, a young man wrote to me, stating that, after a […]
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 […]
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