Articles & Essays

Sayers rises above the average mystery author in both style and profundity. Dorothy Sayers was a successful mystery novelist when she published Gaudy Night (1935), yet this novel is revered as the most literary of her fiction titles. She began publishing mysteries for the money. A struggling,…

You can have your body cremated and your ashes preserved in a golf bag. Etsy will personalize it with any final words of your choosing. We are at the point where a “Golfatorium,” to borrow the poet Thomas Lynch’s phrase, “seems, fetched only as far…

Life is built, and then it stops, and then Christ reaches in and brings it forward again. Ross Wilson is an internationally acclaimed artist who was honored by Queen Elizabeth II with a British Empire Medal. If you visit London, you can see his portraits…

Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested, led to a platform, tied to a stake, and blindfolded before a firing squad. As his biographer Joseph Frank describes the scene: “A cart with coffins could be seen on the side, and a priest came carrying a cross, which they…

I had eighty-two absences my senior year of high school—true story. Not that I stayed home and committed misdemeanors. Rather, I read books by myself in my parents’ quiet living room. I studied European history and researched the nearest school proctoring an Advanced Placement exam…

“If you don’t read good books, you will read bad ones,” C. S. Lewis writes. We may need to update Lewis’s claim for the twenty-first-century reader, for those who do not read good books will not necessarily read bad ones, but may—in not knowing why or…

“Whoever has ears let him hear,” Jesus says. But what if God is speaking a language that’s imperceptible to us, and what if we have made ourselves deaf to his voice? It’s frightening to imagine that we’d be unable to understand God speaking to us.…

When I question students at my Christian college about how their faith affects their learning practices, they stare blankly at me or scribble a note about being motivated by the true, good, and beautiful. But studying (and education) for Christians should look different than a…

Books saved Walker Percy’s life. It would be more accurate to say, novels saved his life. The cure was surprising because Percy was a resident at Columbia University at the time, training to be a physician. He never would have expected his life to take…

How one of America’s greatest Christian authors viewed the thing we all fear It is hard to want to suffer; I presume Grace is necessary for the want,” Flannery O’Connor wrote these lines in her prayer journal in 1946 while she was a graduate student…