To Read and to Live

by Alan Jacobs

The best way we can demonsrate our love for great books is ro use them in our search to discover “what we might do and . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Jun 1993

Walker Percy and the Christian Scandal

by Marion Montgomery

In Washington, where he was to give the eighteenth Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on May 3, 1989, Walker Percy also gave an interview to Scott Walter for Crisis . This is almost exactly a year before his death, and both the interview and his lecture, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Apr 1993

The Cultural Middle Ground

by John P. Sisk

What Joan Shelley Rubin aims to do in The Making of Middlebrow Culture is “redress the disregard and oversimplification of middlebrow culture in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s by illuminating the values and attitudes that shaped some of its major expressions.” Thus she lets us know at . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Nov 1992

On the Death of Literature

by Carol Iannone

Those who began to study literature before the radicalization of the university in the 1970s learned that literary criticism was not only a valid undertaking in itself but a way to understand the larger culture and, indeed, the human condition in general. For a time, it seemed that just as much of . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Oct 1992

Victims Unlimited

by John P. Sisk

In this highly individualistic age, it is probably safe to assume about every victim what Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina assumes about every unhappy family: that each is unhappy in his or her own way. This could mean that to think about victimization now is to be overwhelmed with an . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Aug 1992

The Advent of Literary Science

by John P. Sisk

It is now more than thirty years since C. P. Snow’s Cambridge Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” popularized the notion of a dangerous rift between the literary and scientific world views. Snow put the blame on the pessimistic, anti-social, and politically silly . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Jun 1991

Walker Percy: An Exchange

by Paul Greenberg

It is unfortunate that Paul Greenberg’s appreciation of Walker Percy in these pages (November 1990) should have been marred by his misreading of The Moviegoer. Greenberg has fallen into the common critical error of reading that novel as if it were somehow radically different from . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Mar 1991

Theology Through the Looking Glass

by Richard E. Wentz

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice has been having quite a run through the Garden of Live Flowers. “I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!” she says. “There ought to be some men moving about somewhere—and so there are!” Alice gets excited . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Feb 1991

“J” in Bloom

by Joseph Blenkinsopp

The J of the title was discovered in 1711 by Henning Bernhard Witter, an obscure Lutheran pastor of Hildesheim, so obscure, in fact, that his role in the naming of this source of the Pentateuch was only rediscovered in the present century by the French biblical scholar Adolphe Lods. In the writings . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Feb 1991

God’s Spy: Malcolm Muggeridge, 1903–1990

by M. D. Aeschliman

In the course of a very long life, Malcolm Muggeridge made many enemies, but he surely made more friends, among whom it is one of the great pleasures of my life to have been included. His enemies could be found both to the left and to the right. Those on the left are easy to account for: by . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Feb 1991