Articles & Essays

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?—Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins…

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…

Of the three Transcendentals (truth, goodness, beauty), beauty is the first to become suspect, the first to get called out as useless, the first to be subjectivized. What is the point of enrolling in an art-photography class other than to indulge your own self-expression, or,…

When my daughter’s preschool teacher asked to make an appointment with me, I assumed perhaps my three-year-old had poked a hole in her classmates’ fantasy: Did she tell them that there is no Santa Claus?! The situation was much more egregious, her teacher informed me.…

C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy is one of the great spiritual autobiographies of the 20th century. Lewis wrote it to satisfy those who questioned “how passed from Atheism to Christianity.” Yet, many who picked up the narrative were frustrated at how little attention Lewis paid to argument. Readers…

When we find something beautiful or true or too good to be forgotten, we desire more, to fill our pockets to overflowing and our hearts to the breaking point. Readers flock to the bookstore and pre-order with impatience the latest from a beloved author. Harper…

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…

The titles lining the shelves labeled “fiction” in your typical evangelical bookstore will not be sold in a hundred years. Those novels will never be taught in a college classroom as literature, and they will never transform anyone’s heart, mind, or soul. Rather, those books…

“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…