More on: Essays

WHEN I think about the collective enterprises into which I invest my time Image continues to be the most gratifying. It lies closest to my heart. It’s personal. Likewise, the contacts Greg and I have with our writers, profiled artists, and financial benefactors bring freshets of grace into the day-to-day. The generosity of these people,…

FOR nearly a generation in Hollywood, a gulf has existed between the secular and religious perspectives. It is a rift that appeared in the sixties for many reasons, not least as an expression of a cultural rebellion which was arguably both liberating and destructive. But one result was the lamentable loss on screen of an…

IN its December 1977 issue, when Jimmy Carter’s presidency made national media rediscover the South, Esquire magazine published Walker Percy’s non-interview with himself, entitled “Questions They Never Asked Me So He Asked Them Himself.” Chiefly, he grumbled about pesky interviewers who kept asking him over and over again what he thought of the South, of…

I ONCE heard a story about the late Walker Percy that seems to illustrate the plight of so many struggling artists down through the ages. Percy graduated from medical school in the 1940s but soon came down with tuberculosis and had to spend a couple years in a sanatorium. During that time he underwent a profound…

IRONY, it seems, is the hot topic of the moment. The trigger for this spate of op-eds and Sunday arts-section essays is the recent publication of a book by a graduate student at Yale University. Nearly all of the reviewers and commentators treated this young man’s book the way my kids treat a box of…

At its best, art transfigures the world around us for a brief time, strives to let the radiance of truth, goodness, and beauty flash out for an instant. Art wakes us up, trains our perceptions, and reminds us that when we try to build rigid structures around presence we inevitably lose what we attempt to keep.

IN his essay, “How the West Lost Its Story,” theologian Robert W. Jenson argues that we postmoderns no longer inhabit what he calls a “narratable world.” The heart of Western civilization, he notes, has been the biblical story, which posited a coherent, dramatic narrative—a world that had a beginning, middle, and at least a vision…

IN the final section of The Waste Land (“What the Thunder Said”), T.S. Eliot strives to integrate two dimensions of the poem that have been running on parallel tracks: the snapshots of inner, psychic alienation (“On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing”) and the critique of a decadent social order (the…

AT the heart of every well-made work of art—no matter how dark or disturbing it may be—is an act of praise. In Mark Jarman’s review of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just in this issue he recounts Scarry’s contention that beauty tends to call forth, or beget, more beauty. The beauty of a face,…

JAMES Wood is a literary critic to die for. Earnest, passionate, and erudite, Wood’s lucid, distinctive voice has cut a wide swathe through what often seem like the mutterings and tergiversations of contemporary literary discourse. Still in his thirties, this British expatriate is now the in-house critic at The New Republic and his first collection…