The Dispatch
“Mothers are closer to God the Creator than any other creatures”
What happened in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary can and must happen in our own lives. Each of us has received the Holy […]
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Essay
The Prophetic Witness of St. John Paul II
Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared on CWR on April 1, 2015, and is reposted here, in slightly different form, to mark the 20th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s death on April 2, 2005. […]
Books
Speak, Memory: A review of All That Will Be New: Poems
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 […]
Books
Saint Bede, English Catholicism, and America
May 25th is the feast day of St. Bede, who, perhaps after St. Gregory of Narek, would likely win the award for “least known doctor of the church,” of which there are a total of […]
The Dispatch
“Death on drum”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the mystery of suffering
The mystery of suffering, or the problem of pain as C. S. Lewis called it, has puzzled people since time immemorial, for as long, in fact, as people have been asking fundamental questions about the […]
Essay
Rediscovering the Form of Things: On My Work To Date
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 […]
The Dispatch
The Little Way of Catherine Chandler
In his verse memoir, The Prelude, William Wordsworth wrote: “I began/ My story early, feeling, as I fear, / The weakness of human love for days/ Disowned by memory.” He was anticipating the objection that […]
Features
The decline of culture, the loss of beauty—and the surprising resurgence of poetry
Dana Gioia is an internationally recognized poet and critic, and the author of several collections of verse, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and the widely acclaimed 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016). […]
Books
Elizabeth Jennings and the Poetry of Faith
Before his early death at forty-four, Robert Louis Stevenson confided to one of his best friends from his Samoan hideaway: “Were it not for my health which made it impossible, I could not find it […]
Essay
On teaching the liberal arts
My maturation as a professor came when I learned to love ideas more by way of coming to love them through—in pilgrimage with, in communion […]