• Reckless Hope

    Too often, people try to reduce Revelation to a riddle to be solved, as though the beasts and bowls, trumpets and thrones could be decoded into a neat timeline. To be sure, apocalyptic language has a logic to it—a symbolic grammar that can and should be studied, much like one might analyze poetry or music. Understanding the meaning of those symbols is part of engaging the text; in some ways, Revelation is like a puzzle. But it can’t stop there. Once you’ve “figured it out,” you don’t simply close the book, heave a sigh of intellectual satisfaction, and move on. To do so would be like pulling apart the pieces…

  • Self-Portrait After an Election

    This process of testing myself in front of different pieces wasn’t just a matter of finding an image to fit my mood—the way you might scroll through a streaming service at the end of the day, hoping to find something that will scratch your particular itch. It was a process of clarification, of clarifying what I really thought and felt. In testing my own frame of mind against the framing of these artworks, I was distinguishing between what I was really experiencing and what I thought I should be experiencing, or saw others experiencing around me.

  • Happy Public Domain Day, 2025

    Happy New Year's Day, readers — and Happy Public Domain Day. Every January 1st, we get to celebrate not only the greatest day of college football but also the greatest day for release from copyright of great works of literature, music, art, and other previously copyrighted material — at least in the United States.

  • On Revival, Reading, and “Fruit Detectives”

    “Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback?” by Ross Douthat in The New York Times So the world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago. But the question is whether the religious can reclaim real cultural ground—especially in the heart of secularism, the Western intelligentsia—as opposed to just stirring up a vague nostalgia for belief. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that,…

  • Featured Artist: Stephanie Hunder

    Stephanie Hunder’s art is inspired by memories of growing up in the woodlands and prairies of Minnesota. Her work often begins with forms and textures drawn from landscapes, which are then combined with scientific diagrams as a way to investigate our contemporary relationship to the natural world.

  • Bored at the Museum

    When you enter the room where it’s hanging, even before you fully register what the painting represents, the pleasure is already there, just as you turn the corner and see it on the wall.

  • Lewis on Two Types of Understanding

    Human intellect is incurably abstract. Pure mathematics is the type of successful thought. Yet the only realities we experience are concrete – this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma – either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste – or, more strictly, to…

  • David Foster Wallace on Entertainment

    Who would say entertainment is bad? I mean, I wouldn't say entertainment is bad. But a model of life in which I have a right to be entertained all the time seems to me not to be a promising one. Right?

  • Galsworthy on the Wish to Love the World

    Only one thing really troubled him, sitting there — the melancholy craving in his heart — because the sun was like enchantment on his face and on the clouds and on the golden birch leaves, and the wind's rustle was so gentle, and the yew-tree green so dark, and the sickle of a moon pale in the sky. He might wish and wish and never get it — the beauty and the loving the world!

  • Schall on Higher Education’s Neglect of Higher Things

    I do not think that our higher educational institutions encourage in us a serious consideration of the power of the highest things. I have noticed too many intelligent and sensitive young men and women who darkly suspect this lack, especially in the best schools, I would say, because the best schools often do not realize that they are missing the most important things.