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Tarkovsky’s Sublime Terror

Andrei rublev, the masterpiece of the great Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, opens with a failed attempt to conquer God. A man attached to a hot-air balloon floats to the upper domes of an imposing church, the tallest structure that a mob of fifteenth-century monks and peasants will ever see in . . . . Continue Reading »

Briefly Noted

At ninety-four years old, Eva Brann is both the oldest and longest-serving tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, America’s premier Great Books liberal arts institution. She is also the most widely published member of the faculty, notable at a school aimed at cultivating the life of the mind . . . . Continue Reading »

Letters

Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey’s article “Insight at First Sight” (May 2023) was perceptive and timely. I have experienced the negative attitude toward love-at-first-sight and happily-ever-after stories while studying English in college. Students often resort to thinking of these . . . . Continue Reading »

Losing Their Religion

Nonverts—people who once identified with a religious tradition but now identify with none—are the fastest-growing group in surveys of American religion. They make up the great majority of those (now a quarter of the adult population) who say they have no religion. In this study, Stephen . . . . Continue Reading »

The Uses of Death

A Presbyterian colleague once explained to me that his rule of faith is to believe whatever is most “uplifting.” He found it more uplifting to believe in reincarnation than in death, judgment, and resurrection, because reincarnation “gives us as many chances as we need to get it right.” The . . . . Continue Reading »

Canon of the Word

One of the books that most influenced my moral and personal imagination was a small novel, Une vie de boy (“Houseboy,” 1956), by Ferdinand Oyono. An early novel by a great Cameroonian writer, diplomat, and civil leader, it made a minor splash on the French literary scene when it first . . . . Continue Reading »

Sally Rooney’s Catholic Millennials

Recently, while reading Sally Rooney’s hugely acclaimed novels for the first time, I messaged a friend to say how bleak I was finding them. He replied that his impression of the books was different. In a way, we were both right. On the one hand, the novels have shafts of light and humor; . . . . Continue Reading »

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