The Best American Poetry 2018 edited by dana gioia scribner, 240 pages, $18.99 American poetry lost three greats last year: John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall. But it also welcomed A. R. Ammons’s “Finishing Up,” A. E. Stallings’s “Pencil,” and Anne . . . . Continue Reading »
I just passed a sign in a store window that says, “No Vacancy for Hate.” Well, I thought, that’s a little less righteous than similar messages in front lawns and restaurant portals: “Hate Is Not Welcome Here,” “Hate Is Not a Family Value,” and other censures of the number one sin . . . . Continue Reading »
Liberalism has created a world in which disordered souls kill themselves with drugs and alcohol—and in which those harboring murderous thoughts feel free to act upon them. Continue Reading »
A deep, hard-to-pinpoint angst saps and drains the morale of America’s children: The quiet carnage of the cult of success. Continue Reading »
Just seventy years ago, a Fortune poll reported that 62 percent of Americans listened to classical music, 40 percent could identify Arturo Toscanini as an orchestral conductor, and nine million listeners (11 percent of American households) tuned in to weekly Metropolitan Opera broadcasts from New . . . . Continue Reading »
The Seer opens with a blur of urban lights and longings: the faster freeway, the taller building, the machines that become the objects of our affections. Over this, the film’s subject, in his distinctive timbre, laments the pursuit of “the objective.” These opening three minutes culminate in . . . . Continue Reading »
The Catholic love affair with the United States of America is heading into rough and uncharted waters—and not only in this 2016 election cycle, but for the foreseeable future. U.S. Catholics have, in a sense, been there and done that, given that the history of the Church in this country includes . . . . Continue Reading »
The second challenge I see facing American churches today (I discuss the first one here) is how the Church engages postmodernism in American culture. By “postmodern” I do not simply mean the period succeeding modernity, however one wants to date that. Rather, I mean the subjectivist thrust of . . . . Continue Reading »
Ross Douthat’s Erasmus lecture, “A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism,” and Carl Trueman’s column, “Is There A Crisis in Conservative Protestantism?” put me in mind to think about the American Church. That said, I’m more of a “not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper” kind of guy, not that . . . . Continue Reading »
Small nations look outward. I was born in Jamaica—remain a Jamaican citizen, for that matter—and we Jamaicans learned early that history was something that mainly happened elsewhere. We knew that Jamaica was, at best, peripheral to the social and political developments that defined the age.This . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
