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The Great American Novel
I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita during my second semester of college, reading it furtively and fifty minutes at a time during an Old Testament class. (I would take another course from the same...
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Breaking Our Silence for Walker Percy
Walker Percy, the guy on the far right of our banner, died twenty years ago today. His death was in its way a victory. He’d contracted tuberculosis in the early 1940s and spent much of his young...
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Moral Equivalency, Sad Clowns, and World War II
In my last few years of college, when I knew I was headed toward graduate school but didn’t know what the experience would be like, I found myself groping, nearly blindly, for texts that would give me...
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Book Review: “Making Haste from Babylon”
Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World By Nick Bunker Illustrated. 489 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.00. Two eras of American history seem to be of perpetual interest to readers:...
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Book Review: “Super Sad True Love Story”
Super Sad True Love Story By Gary Shteyngart 334 pp. Random House. $26. Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, the awkwardly if endearingly titled Super Sad True Love Story, is a dystopian vision of America’s...
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Bowls of Milk
Something about nineteenth-century America made great novelists shoot for immense public success by eliminating what it was about their writing that made them great. The most obvious and egregious...
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Troy Maxson Goes to Heaven
I’ve enjoyed this semester, not least because, for the first time since 2004, I’ve been called on to teach a general survey of literature, in this case Emmanuel College’s English 200 class. The sort...
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Christian Suffering and Divine Alienation
I know of no book more convicting than Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship; read this book closely and seriously enough, and you will likely have to stop calling yourself a Christian....
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The Death and Resurrection of the Author
He must have regretted it for the rest of his life, but J.D. Salinger perfectly encapsulated the deep affection a reader develops for an author. “What really knocks me out,” Holden Caulfield announces...
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An entirely untested hypothesis
Here’s a thought I just had: what if Americans aren’t anti-intellectual per se but have an aversion to the Appeal to Authority? In my experience, actually taking the time to articulate the argument for...
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