The Wall Street Journal featured this article by Image founder and editor Gregory Wolfe on Friday, January 11, 2013: Among our national pastimes, there is none more persistent than the ritual lament over the decline and fall of the arts. The death of the novel . . . the end of painting . . . if…

Dear Readers of Good Letters: Last year I took the opportunity on Thanksgiving day to thank you for reading Image journal’s “Good Letters” blog. It’s been another amazing year as our team of bloggers continues to produce moving, enlightening, and lovingly-crafted prose. The number of those who subscribe to this feed has more than doubled…

Dear Readers of Good Letters: As it is Thanksgiving Day, I thought I might take this opportunity to pop out from behind the curtain and share a few brief words with you, including a bit of news and a word of thanks. We’re now a year and a half into this literary experiment—less a blog…

Note: The following is the text of the commencement address given for the graduates of the Seattle Pacific University MFA in Creative Writing program, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, August 1, 2009. On behalf of the staff and faculty of the SPU MFA program, I’d like to offer a warm welcome to all the friends…

Continued from yesterday. As I wrap up this series on the state of Catholic letters, I’d like to make a few final distinctions and then name some of the writers I think should be more widely known and discussed within the Church in North America. I’ve thrown down what I think is a friendly, if…

Note: For those of you wondering when the rest of the Good Letters team will get a chance to post again, be assured: they’ll be back soon. This little series of mine is giving them a wee break (and me a chance to catch up a little on my post-count). In the last two posts…

In my last post I opened up one of those proverbial cans of worms: the question of whether or not something called “Catholic fiction”—or perhaps any sort of creative writing by Catholics—is alive and well, or not. I admit it: in that post I came out swinging. One Catholic blogger thought I went too far:…

In the conservative Catholic press—and blogosphere—there has been much harrumphing about the decline and fall of Catholic letters. Of course, the question of whether Catholic writing is alive, much less well, is really just another skirmish in the larger culture wars—perpetuated largely by those with ideological axes to grind. I am not so naïve as…

The following post is an adapted version of the commencement address for the 2008 graduating class of the Seattle Pacific University MFA in Creative Writing Program. I’d like to say a few words today about memory, inspired by St. Augustine, whose Confessions we have been reading together. The Confessions are the first great work of…

One of the perils of editing a journal of high culture (and publicly lamenting the dumbing down of the culture generally) is that people assume I’m an art snob. Few seem willing to say this directly to my face, but a couple of the more candid folks out there have told me they imagine me…