How long, O Lord? The question is posed repeatedly by the Psalmist. It continues to be posed across the ages, uttered even by our lips in the shadows of a dark season. How long must I suffer this illness? Drag through this labor? Bear with evil men? Did not our Lord himself wonder this . . . . Continue Reading »
The collection of Yad Vashem, Israel’s museum of the Holocaust and memorial to its victims, presents us with a chronicle of human barbarity and evil. But in its celebration of those “Righteous Gentiles” who protected Jews, it preserves a luminous moral and spiritual legacy. Among those . . . . Continue Reading »
The Catholic way is to include, and then sift: wise words from a wise priest that I remembered a few years back when I was reading, in this journal, an article withering in its condemnation of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the British court decision that opened the way . . . . Continue Reading »
Life wreathes flowers for death to wear. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), who said as much, is dead and gone, his sonnets deader still, if we may judge by classroom syllabi and the infrequency with which his name appears in the leading periodicals. He still crops up half a dozen times a decade . . . . Continue Reading »
Two pivotal developments will transform the West. One is mass migration, which, in tandem with declining birthrates, is producing demographic change in Europe and North America. The other is the green transition and the massive amount of capital allocated to build a new economy. The first erodes the . . . . Continue Reading »
For pleasure, Fortune, a designer, weaves.We are her stuff—yarn, thread, and loom, ideal.Her tapestry seems flawless; she conceivesit cunningly, attended by her wheel, whose mechanism works, apparently.But might there be a wheel of Providencethat goes around, beyond contingency? It waits . . . . Continue Reading »
He is a churchyard. In his grasses, crossesHave blossomed once again, like quartered rosesThat know the real crowns are made of thorns.Redolent cedar, these, both kings and thronesIn one, and no, they aren’t marking graves.Here is no fear and trembling. No one grieves.No sickness unto death, no . . . . Continue Reading »
Where I live drought desecrates,Heat scorches fields, crops wither,Wasted while elsewhere floodsDevour bridges to rip asunderFriend and family. Things fallApart. The parched earth cracks,The chasms widen to swallowWhole our fractured world. Here, before us, the abyss,Yet, if you can, imagine . . . . Continue Reading »
We asked some of our writers to contribute a paragraph about the most memorable books they read this year. Continue Reading »
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