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The Beauty Dialogues, Part 5

By Morgan MeisMay 31, 2017

Today Morgan Meis continues his periodic exchanges on the nature of beauty with Image founder Gregory Wolfe. Dear Greg, In your last letter, you asked me not to hesitate in taking a “real swing” at you, philosophically speaking. (Or were you suggesting that this tête-à-tête must inevitably culminate in the back of an alley somewhere?)…

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The Beauty Dialogues, Part 3

By Morgan MeisApril 4, 2017

Today Morgan Meis continues his periodic exchanges with Image founder Gregory Wolfe. Dear Greg, Thanks for your response to my latest “challenge,” as you put it, on the question of beauty. I love all the things you have to say and find myself both moved and convinced by the nuanced, complicated version of beauty you’ve…

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The Beauty Dialogues, Part 2

By Gregory WolfeMarch 16, 2017

The following is a response to Morgan Meis’s letter posted yesterday. Dear Morgan: Thanks for throwing down this particular gauntlet. Yes, we adopted Dostoevsky’s phrase from The Idiot, where one of the characters attributes the saying “beauty will save the world” to the eponymous hero of the novel, Prince Myshkin. I’m well aware that any…

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The Beauty Dialogues, Part 1

By Morgan MeisMarch 15, 2017

Today Morgan Meis continues his periodic exchanges with Image founder Gregory Wolfe.  Dear Greg, When we first started our conversation (see posts here, here and here for background), I thought we were having a debate about the declining relevance of religious intellectuals in today’s public realm. But that’s not what it was really about. At…

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Hot Stuff: What Image Contributors Are Reading This Month, Part 1

By ImageFebruary 20, 2017

The writers and artists in our pages are interesting folks with interesting reading lives. So we asked the contributors in Image’s current issue: what have you read, seen, or listened to lately that you would recommend to our readers? They did not disappoint.  Want more Contributor Picks? Find more in our free review and curation service,…

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Beauty

By Morgan MeisNovember 16, 2016

I have beauty on the mind. No doubt a result of my ongoing debate with Gregory Wolfe (running into its fourth iteration now). We’ve been chatting, lo these many weeks, about the relevance of the religious voice to contemporary debates on aesthetical matters. When you’re talking about aesthetics, the question of beauty tends to rear…

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The Debate About Beauty

By Morgan MeisOctober 26, 2016

I’ve been engaged in an ongoing wrangle with Gregory Wolfe about the status of Christian intellectuals in the public sphere. We got a bit stuck on the question of T.S. Eliot and the worthiness of New Criticism. Mr. Wolfe has helped to un-stick the conversation with a rather devastating reply to my last post. Pointing…

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T.S. Eliot, Agent of His Own Demise

By Morgan MeisOctober 3, 2016

In my last post for Good Letters, I took minor issue with a point my friend and mentor Gregory Wolfe made about the relative prominence of Christian public intellectuals around the middle of the last century. Wolfe named, as examples of such prominence, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Allen Tate, T.S. Eliot, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul…

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The New Critics and the Barbarians

By Morgan MeisSeptember 8, 2016

The poet and writer Dana Gioia penned an essay for the December 2013 issue of First Things titled “The Catholic Writer Today: Catholic Writers Must Renovate and Reoccupy Their Own Tradition.” The essay does not inspire much confidence in the state of “Catholic” writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our own Gregory Wolfe…

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Dispatch from Detroit

By Morgan MeisJuly 27, 2016

We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time… —Thomas Merton There were young men out in the streets of Hamtramck blowing things up last night. God knows what they’d gotten their hands on. Could have been small sticks of dynamite for the blast it…

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