The Seder in Quarantine
When the world’s Jews gather to celebrate Passover this Wednesday night, our seder tables will be uncannily private, small gatherings reduced from the scale of family to that of individual households
Author: J.L. Wall
J.L. Wall is a native Kentuckian in self-imposed exile to the Midwest, where he teaches writing to college students and over-analyzes Leonard Cohen lyrics.
Why Even Non-Catholics Must Care About the Sex Abuse Revelations
Don’t let the fact that these aren’t your institutions convince you to look away from the scandal. The only way to recognize them at home is to see them plain from a distance.
Techlash and Soulcraft
How Christopher Beha’s satire of celebrity culture creates space for the human in technology’s panopticon
The River is a Strong Brown God
The parishes around Baton Rouge are underwater from a thousand-year rain and the flooding that’s followed.
Remembering Elie Wiesel, Novelist
The late Elie Wiesel spent his life telling stories — just not the kind he’s known for.
Marilynne Robinson and the Absence of a Religious Left
In her essays, the award-winning novelist examines the significance, past, present, and future, of America’s missing Religious Left.
Slavery’s Legacies, Addiction’s Realities: Delicious Foods, by James Hannaham
Slavery, like the past, isn’t past. It ain’t even dead yet.
Louise Glück and the Aspiration of Poetry
What do anthologies do to the experience of reading poetry? And what makes a poem a poem, anyway?
Atticus Finch Is Still a Decent Man
J.L. Wall explores the duality of Atticus Finch as portrayed in both the newly-released Go Set A Watchman and the classic To Kill A Mockingbird.
A Book for Every Type
The Paris Review endorses Maddie Crum’s “One Perfect Book for Every Single Myers-Briggs Type.” Like all Myers-Briggs related lists, it’s at once silly, entertaining, and at least partially true. Mine:
Free-Range Organic Visual Arts
How the rise of “Amazon Art” and CSAs for local artists extends earlier business models—and how each needs the other to succeed.
The Ballad of Billy and Ike A.
If you need to laugh this morning, Alan Jacobs has you taken care of with his graphic novel adaptation of Ikea instructions.
Gettysburg’s Headlines, Day Two (Don’t Worry, Be Happy)
On July 3, the New York Times announced its possession of “VERY IMPORTANT NEWS: Further Particulars of the Battle Near Gettysburg on Wednesday.” The item that follows isn’t what the reader of a contemporary...
Gettysburg’s Headlines, Day One (The Fog of War)
At the beginning of July, 1863, Union newspapers were abuzz with reports of Lee’s invasion. Headlines in the New York Times fell under the bold-print category “REBEL INVASION”: “Important Intelligence Regarding the Movements of...
Compensated Emancipation Was Tried — But Didn’t Work
Ta-Nehisi Coates takes the time to respond, with historical data, to the those who would claim the Civil War could have been avoided through a program of compensated emancipation. He’s certainly right that this...
Sunday Evening Theism
I wish I could offer a fuller response to the post Christopher’s “Sunday Morning Atheism.” He raised, powerfully and cogently, some of the issues that do—or should—plague any believer. Sincerity in a religious endeavor...
Atheism, Paganism, and the God of Abraham
Several months ago, Rod Dreher, responding to several commenters on his blog, wondered whether a decline of Christianity in the West will lead to an atheistic society or a pagan one. There are, to...
