More on: Gregory Wolfe

HE SAID he never intended to found anything, and I believe him. But he had a gift for friendship. When his funeral mass was celebrated in Milan last month, thirty thousand of his companions were there. The principal celebrant, Cardinal Ratzinger, delivered a message from another friend, Karol Wojtyla. It may be a truism to…

ANY NEW book about the relationship between the Bible and literature enters a crowded field, one strewn with masterworks by the likes of Robert Alter, Frank Kermode, Northrop Frye, and Gabriel Josipovici. So the bar is set high. Nicholas Boyle’s Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature (reviewed in this issue) clears that…

IN A RECENT essay, poet Ira Sadoff issued a sweeping denunciation of what he calls the “spiritualization of American poetry.” Entitled “Trafficking in the Radiant” and published in the July/August American Poetry Review, the essay asserts that contemporary poets have been influenced by the resurgence of religiosity in our culture, with disastrous results. “My contention…

TOWARD the end of his life, Karl Marx found himself in conversation with an earnest, would-be acolyte who was burbling about his plan to found a Marxist club. The older man suddenly rounded on him, declaring: “Je ne suis pas une Marxiste!” (I am not a Marxist). In a few simple words Marx managed not…

The Voice of This Calling Art and Vocation FOUR days after I turned three, my sister was born. I was young enough to be confused and anxious about what was going on. My mother had grown large and then abruptly disappeared from our apartment, where I was left with a sitter. This all took place…

There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination. What…

MOST EDUCATED PEOPLE, in addition to a set of favorite authors, artists, and composers, develop a fascination for one or more historic cultures: republican Rome, say, or colonial New England or the Ming dynasty. Sometimes these passions are matters of aesthetic or intellectual taste, but often they bear a relationship to the individual’s ideas about what constitutes the…

The following is adapted from the preface to The Operation of Grace: Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery. My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou art…

The recent controversy over Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture—which touched on the nature of human reason, but which also questioned, in passing, the relationship between faith and reason in Islam—may turn out to be more productive than was at first thought. Among other things, it generated a substantive open letter to the pope signed by…

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! ——————William Wordsworth WITHIN JUST A FEW WEEKS, America recently lost two of its finest sons—William F. Buckley Jr. and E. Victor Milione. One was known to millions, while the other preferred obscurity, but both were seminal figures in the…