Posts Tagged ‘T.S. Eliot’
The Beauty Dialogues, Part 2
March 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…
Read MoreThe Debate About Beauty
October 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…
Read MoreT.S. Eliot, Agent of His Own Demise
October 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…
Read MoreThe New Critics and the Barbarians
September 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…
Read MoreThe Harboring Silence, Part 2
September 25, 2015
Continued from yesterday. The following editorial statement from issue 86 of Image is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 8, 2015. Denise Levertov’s poems nearly always contain vivid reminders of the oral nature of poetry, of poetry as speech addressed…
Read MoreThe Harboring Silence, Part 1
September 24, 2015
The following editorial statement from issue 86 of Image is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 8, 2015. “The great poet does not completely fill out the space of his theme with his words. He leaves a space clear,…
Read MoreArt on Fire: The Life and Work of Melissa Weinman, Part 2
July 9, 2015
When Weinman completed her fellowship in Europe, she came back to the U.S., where she began a new life that included marriage, the birth of two daughters, and a new chapter in her pilgrim faith.
“I think I’m a Christian, but I don’t know how to do it.” This was how she approached an Episcopal priest in her neighborhood, looking for spiritual direction. Although he was on the point of retirement, he agreed to meet with her once a week, and for the next year, they discussed Christian teachings and the Bible.
Read More