After Disenchantment: C.S. Lewis, Sally Rooney, and the Perennial Hunger
By Culture Issue 113
Many have lamented that we don’t have a Lewis to help us think through these questions (or a Chesterton or a Tolkien to help him), but in my estimation Sally Rooney comes pretty close.
Read MoreI Trust My Soul to Grace: Paul Schrader’s Religious Imagination
By Culture Issue 113
Like a person caught in quicksand, the Schrader male antihero struggles toward salvation only to be driven deeper into the thing that’s swallowing him whole.
Read MoreGnostic 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Duplex isn’t a disenchanted world, where saints have been replaced by stonemasons. It’s not even a world where belief in the soul has been replaced by the fact of robots.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 More