[spotify id=”spotify%3Auser%3A122351017%3Aplaylist%3A2qc8STZPA5tMmMSDCeNRKe&view=coverart” width=”500″ height=”580″ /] Here: Ryan Culwell. Winter Wheat. It’s beautiful.  And heads up: a full length album comes out next year (hush hush, from the same people that have brought you Jason Isbell’s recent and stunning Southeastern). Or if you prefer Soundcloud

In the first centuries of Christianity, the new religion proved insufficient for the educated people in many ways, and so gnosticism became widespread. Gnosticism did then what poetry does today for educated people. But poetry should not be reduced to mere aestheticism. In its most important instances, poetry is an exploration of man’s place in […]

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ C.S. Lewis, The […]

Like most good poets, great or minor, Dante wrote better than he had meant to do. Allen Tate. “The Symbolic Imagination.” Essays of Four Decades. p. 440. Third Edition, ISI Books.

It was hard not to think of all this—of the Iliad with its grand funereal finale, of the Odyssey strangely pivoting around so many burials, and of course of “Antigone”—as I followed the story of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s unburied body over the past few weeks. I thought, of course, of canny politicians eyeing the public mood, […]

If I think of a king at nightfall, Of three men, and more, on the scaffold And a few who died forgotten In other places, here and abroad, And of one who died blind and quiet, Why should we celebrate These dead men more than the dying? It is not to ring the bell backward […]

That night—to some extent, that picture—changed [my friend Rob’s] life. He enrolled in Bible classes at the church, and went on to become a missionary in Africa. The same night sent me in the opposite direction, at least for a time. But would a different painting—Caravaggio’s “Conversion of St. Paul,” for example—have kept me in […]

Every poet, consciously or unconsciously, holds the following absolute presuppositions, as the dogmas of his art: (1) A historical world exists, a world of unique events and unique persons, related by analogy, not identity. The number of events and analogical relations is potentially infinite. The existence of such a world is a good, and every […]

It Was the Summer of ’69 (*1)

Begin here: Christ is contingency, I tell her as we cross the railroad tracks and walk down the dusty main street of this little town that is not the town where I was raised, but both reassuringly and disconcertingly reminiscent of it: the ramshackle resiliency of the buildings around the square; Spanish rivering right next to […]

So if we try to feel our way towards a general sense of what the contemporary fantasy world is telling us about violence and destruction, the result seems to be this: pain and injury and sudden death are unpredictable, not planned or chosen by anyone like ourselves, yet always threatening, always around the corner. Against […]