Joseph Bottum

Sometimes a book is in the canon of children’s literature just because the writing is so good. Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, for instance, stands as the perfection of its kind: a prose of greeny gold, of summer recollected in autumn’s light. Rudyard Kipling, too, has the perfect sort . . . . Continue Reading »

So, I spent Columbus Day weekend writing ballads. Or, at least, browsing around in books of ballads, singing and strumming away at them badly, and trying to think my way through their strange plot inversions and narrative compressions. In the best ballads, I feel some deep root of English being . . . . Continue Reading »

Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away . . . . Continue Reading »

Thanksgiving was always tense while I was growing up, and I don’t know why. Christmas, now¯Christmas was mostly fun and presents and carols and laughter, as I remember. But Thanksgiving was arguments and huffs and recriminations and doors slamming and one indistinguishable great-uncle or . . . . Continue Reading »

The following documents are useful in clarifying the truth of what Father Jay Scott Newman of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville, South Carolina, said in the aftermath of the November 4 election about conscience, voting, material cooperation with intrinsic evil, repentance, and the . . . . Continue Reading »

Christmas time is almost here¯aarrgghh, how I hate that sentiment when Halloween is not long past, election day barely over, and Thanksgiving not yet come.Still, in the world of magazine publishing, you have to think ahead, and that joyful season of the year is at our throats again. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Ah, here we go: A group called “Catholics In Alliance” apparently has a video out that features pictures of prominent Catholics from across a wide political spectrum. Among them is Richard John Neuhaus. No permission was given for the use of Fr. Neuhaus’ image, and, in truth, . . . . Continue Reading »

I It was a season of small demagogueries, a time of the easy lie and the useful exaggeration. A little shading of truth, a little twisting of facts—it was a political moment, in other words, and hardly anyone is naive enough to forget that partisan politics always has partisan purposes. Hardly . . . . Continue Reading »

The November issue of First Things is now hot off the griddle¯a rich, tasty new issue, with major essays from the likes of Richard John Neuhaus, Gilbert Meilaender, and Stephen Barr. Book reviews, poems, letters, and Opinions¯to say nothing of another flavorful installment of the The . . . . Continue Reading »

You’ll find here Truman Capote, and James Thurber, and Dorothy Killgallen, and “the queen of true crime,” Ann Rule. You’ll find here the literati, and the popular hacks, and the bored corporate lawyers with hobbies in unsolved murders, and the penny-a-word boys from the lurid . . . . Continue Reading »