Posts Tagged ‘literature’
Children Need Stories That Tell the Truth About Life and Death
September 6, 2019
Stories that offer an easy answer to life’s sorrows may seem soothing so long as we remain privileged, cocooned, unaware of the violence of human history, but stories that leave us troubled and uncertain are the ones we can take with us when we are exiled from this narrow shelter.
Read MoreMy Frankenstein
February 1, 2018
My Frankenstein is first and foremost a novel. A custard-colored Pound Classic published by Penguin UK, to be exact. Though I’ve taught from several editions, as the novel turns two hundred it’s to that tiny, flimsy volume with which I first made contact that my thoughts turn. My wife and I were in Oxford, England,…
Read MoreThe Iron Cross, Part 1
August 7, 2017
This post originally appeared on “Good Letters” on October 13, 2014. I didn’t know Julia well. The first time I saw her, she was sitting at the far end of the table around which our language class met. Although I knew the instructor, Chiara, it was my first day with this group of students who…
Read MoreStopping the Press
December 12, 2016
This is the time of year when we work on Image’s annual budget. Here in the excruciatingly lean nonprofit sector, there’s a sort of elegant efficiency to having very little to spend—but it also means that when we need to make cuts, we cut close to the bone. I’m a practical person, and so I…
Read MoreWhy I Support Image (*Updated*)
December 8, 2016
Dear readers, When Image was founded in 1989, we turned to a few literary exemplars for endorsements. After all, we had no reputation, money, or power, so we needed to find advocates whose words carried authority. One of the first we turned to was Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Dillard, whose incandescent prose dealt with some of…
Read MoreThere is More to See: A Letter from Gregory Wolfe
November 17, 2016
Dear friends, We are entering a season of thanksgiving, and soon we’ll begin a season of reflection as we prepare to celebrate a remarkable birth that changed human history. I begin with thanksgiving. On behalf of all the staff at Image, thank you. Thank you for being part of our community. Thank you for your…
Read MoreReading (in) Walden
October 19, 2016
What are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave.… To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise….…
Read MoreT.S. Eliot, Agent of His Own Demise
October 3, 2016
In my last post for Good Letters, I took minor issue with a point my friend and mentor Gregory Wolfe made about the relative prominence of Christian public intellectuals around the middle of the last century. Wolfe named, as examples of such prominence, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul…
Read MoreThe New Critics and the Barbarians
September 8, 2016
The poet and writer Dana Gioia penned an essay for the December 2013 issue of First Things titled “The Catholic Writer Today: Catholic Writers Must Renovate and Reoccupy Their Own Tradition.” The essay does not inspire much confidence in the state of “Catholic” writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our own Gregory Wolfe…
Read MoreMy Own Commencement, Part 2: The Uses of Confusion
September 2, 2016
This post is excerpted from Gregory Wolfe’s final commencement address as director of the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing last month. Wolfe, who founded the program, stepped down as director yesterday. Read part 1 here. I’d like to close my commencement address by taking a lesson or two from the…
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