Gregory Wolfe

In 2013, Dana Gioia argued in these pages that “although Roman Catholicism constitutes the largest religious and cultural group in the United States, Catholicism currently enjoys almost no positive presence in the American fine arts.” I was reminded of that contention when it dawned on me that . . . . Continue Reading »

Pity the satirist: He labors under a double burden. There is, first and foremost, the need to be funny. Whatever kind of laughter the satirist conjures—whether it be queasy or full-out—the jokes have to land. Comedians have no safety net, and the ground is hard-packed. Then there is the . . . . Continue Reading »

Ninety-Nine Stories of Godby joy williamstin house, 168 pages, $19.95Joy Williams has often been celebrated, but it seems safe to say that her prose is more feared than loved. A master of the short story, a novelist nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and an essayist on environmental matters, Williams . . . . Continue Reading »

When Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in The Atlantic in 1991, it galvanized a national conversation about the state of American literature and how creative writing was being taught, produced, and consumed by the reading public. Among other points, Gioia argued that poetry had become obscure, self-referential, and detached from common experience through the influence of university writing programs and trendy ideological nostrums. Gioia’s latest essay, “The Catholic Writer Today,” published in the December 2013 issue of First Things, bears a striking resemblance to his Atlantic essay on poetry . . . Continue Reading »

The Finishing School by Muriel Spark Doubleday. 192 pp. $16.95 Muriel Spark, Dame of the British Empire, expatriate Scot living in Tuscany, has been practicing her peculiar brand of elegant satire for half a century. Approaching ninety, Spark has just published The Finishing School , her . . . . Continue Reading »

Tony Hendra’s Father Joe was given a front page review in the New York Times Book Review in which it was very nearly damned with shrill praise. The reviewer, Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic pundit, certainly did not damn the book in terms of sales”his review undoubtedly helped make the . . . . Continue Reading »

According to Giorgio Vasari, author of the monumental Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Michelangelo was so secretive about his work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that Pope Julius II, the patron of the project, took to donning disguises and sneaking in at night to catch . . . . Continue Reading »

Some of the greatest Modernists, including the painter Georges Rouault, the poet T. S. Eliot, and the composer Igor Stravinsky, found in the language of abstraction, fragmentation, and primitivism ways to reconnect ancient religious truths with the conditions of the modern . . . . Continue Reading »

Within three years of its completion, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper began to flake and fade. The artist had staked his masterpiece, which he spent over two years painting, on a technical gamble, and lost. Always the inventor, Leonardo had come up with the novel idea of applying oil paint . . . . Continue Reading »

The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold Warby hilton kramerivan r. dee, 398 pages, $27.50 In the summer of 1952, Hilton Kramer’s life took a fateful turn. While attending a program known as the “School of Letters” in Indiana—where he had gone . . . . Continue Reading »