Various

Most of us that grew up in the peripheries don’t buy the central premise of this pontificate of making the Church less European. I agree with R. R. Reno’s assertions in “Rome’s Concordat” (March 2024) that this pontificate sounds like a focus group at the World Economic Forum or a DEI . . . . Continue Reading »

There was a time when the Church shaped Western high art, particularly art music, as distinct from folk or pop music. That era has been over for centuries, yet the impetus for composers to engage with spirituality has endured. There has been no shortage of scholars in recent decades endeavoring to . . . . Continue Reading »

Living within a stone’s throw of the nation’s leading collection of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood art housed at the Delaware Art Museum, I was familiar with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art but not his poetry. I therefore appreciate having been enlightened by Brian Patrick Eha’s “Rossetti the . . . . Continue Reading »

There’s a poem by John Donne that makes a presence of an absence; his absent love becomes as real to the speaker and more fully his than if she were present. This could illustrate what Katherine Rundell wants us to see in the work of John Donne, seventeenth-century metaphysical poet and preacher, . . . . Continue Reading »

For a magazine devoted to religion and public life, the piece by R. R. Reno entitled “Engines of Destruction” was rather strange (January 2024). Religious analysis was almost completely absent: Except for an attack on the positioning of Christian leaders and Pope Francis, it was . . . . Continue Reading »

Initially developed at the University of Toronto between the 1930s and 1970s, media ecology is a meta-disciplinary perspective that understands media as environments that shape human consciousness. Despite this expansive approach to media, media ecology has generally shied away from exploring that . . . . Continue Reading »

Liel Leibovitz’s article “Fight Together, Win Together” (December 2023) is a stirring encapsulation of the dark side, so to speak, of intersectionality’s ideological ascendancy within western academic institutions. Two questions stand out to me after reading the piece. Several groups of . . . . Continue Reading »

We asked some of our writers to contribute a paragraph about the most memorable books they read this year. Continue Reading »

I appreciated Mark Bauerlein’s recent essay “System’s Failure” (November 2023) on some of the many flaws in “systemic bias.” There is, however, a much easier way to dismiss the whole enterprise out of hand: when proponents are unwilling to start with the government’s K–12 education . . . . Continue Reading »

I very much enjoyed Armin Rosen’s essay about the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (“Tarkovksy’s Sublime Terror,” October 2023), but I’m afraid he has made an error of fact about Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. Rosen says the protagonist, Andrei Gorchakov, “swallows poison and then . . . . Continue Reading »