Gnostic Ironies: New Poetry by Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe
By Culture Issue 112
Like Mackey, [Howe] is forced to interpret the historical recurrence of evil as cruelly fated; human beings are the unwitting playthings of what she calls, in Manimal Woe, “the mystery of repetition.”
Read MoreAmerican Contrapasso: The Kingdoms Are Always Near
By Culture Issue 112
One can almost hear T.S. Eliot, the native Missourian in his self-imposed exile from America, looking out over these rust belts and muttering, “I had not thought that globalism had undone so many.”
Read MoreThe Wolf Hour: The Cosmic Realism of Kathryn Davis
By Culture Issue 111
Duplex isn’t a disenchanted world, where saints have been replaced by stonemasons. It’s not even a world where belief in the soul has been replaced by the fact of robots. It’s a hinged world, a duplex world, where the human and the cosmic, the soul and the stars, stand side by side.
Read MoreSonic Theology: Heather Christian’s Musical and Theatrical Liturgies
By Culture Issue 111
The musical metaphors and techniques here surpass a simple recitation of the creed, in part because the music is doing something deeply trinitarian, and you don’t need music theory to feel this in your body.
Read MoreThe Light of Promise
By Culture Issue 110
Today, in a comprehensive fulfilment of biblical promise, your iPhone, which counts your steps and is acquainted with your ways both public and private, will offer to route your path home and watch over your lying down.
Read MoreThe Uncontained Life
By Culture Issue 110
It’s as though the movie represents an alternate life for any of us. Take away a job. Take away a spouse. Take away an able body. Take away good mental health. How many of us could maintain our current lifestyles for long before we’d feel the crunch, the walls closing in?
Read MoreA World Beyond Our Skin: Jenny Erpenbeck and the Potential of Fiction
By Culture Issue 109
It is a horrible, wrenching, annihilating sentence. Erpenbeck, in all her unsentimental moral rigor, refuses to look away from the moment of absolute horror.
Read MoreRecording Angels: New Fiction by Phil Klay and Christopher Beha
By Culture Issue 109
For if there were a heavenly recorder, then Frank could be assured that someone would make sense of his life, that it would not be lost to memory but would always be an object of significance.
Read MoreUntranslatable Mother: Tarkovsky, Zurlini, and the Madonna del Parto
By Culture Issue 108
Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.
Read MoreWith My Body I Thee Worship
By Culture Issue 107
Glück’s novel was a particularly poignant book to read this spring, when I found myself abruptly unable to touch another person, go to Mass, or receive the Eucharist. Lent rolled on without any anticipation of a liberatory Easter; then it was Easter, and I was still alone.
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