Since the mid-19th century, when the Cambridge Camden Society, also known as the Ecclesiologists, began to advocate for medieval “pointed” architecture as uniquely appropriate for sacred buildings, the Gothic Revival has held a privileged position as the “correct” style for churches. A side effect of the Ecclesiologists’ very successful advocacy for Gothic has been a certain disregard for the classically styled church buildings dating from the immediately preceding years around 1800, which the Ecclesiologists unfairly disparaged as plain and undistinguished. Christopher Webster’s thoroughly researched and carefully argued book, copiously illustrated with 378 beautiful new photographs by Geoff Brandwood, aims to revise that conventional wisdom.

Webster argues that, at a time when the established church faced challenges both external (the growth of Nonconformism and Catholicism, the Napoleonic wars, alienation from the lower classes) and internal (inefficiencies, mismanagement, and abuses), the building program that produced over 1,500 new churches was an expression of confidence. In an era that prized the importance of reason, the national church wanted to discourage both Nonconformist “enthusiasm” and Roman “superstition”; thus, both in liturgy and architecture, the idea of rational, well-ordered worship guided many decisions.

This is evident, for example, in the floor plans of the buildings. In contrast to both Catholic churches (which placed the central focus on the altar), or Nonconformist Protestant chapels (which centered on the preacher in the pulpit), Anglican churches strove for a harmonious accommodation of both pulpit and altar. Still, the “auditory worship” of spoken Morning and Evening Prayer was the top priority in shaping these buildings (which the Ecclesiologists later dismissed as “preaching boxes” or “sermon houses”), and Communion was less frequent, which meant that the pulpit was usually more prominent than the altar. Singers and musicians were placed in galleries well away from the chancel (to emphasize their secular status), and the distinctive three-decker pulpit placed the clerk at the bottom, the middle level for reading the service and prayers, and the top level for preaching the sermon, so it could be clearly heard throughout the space.

As regards the question of style, the Classical predominated until the end of the 18th century because it was seen as rational and harmonious in form. By the early 19th century, however, even before the rise of the Ecclesiologists, the Gothic had begun to rise in popularity because of its association with English tradition and the historical continuity of the church (as against French radicalism). For readers familiar with the eventual triumph of the Gothic, Webster’s presentation of important Classical achievements such as St. Chad’s Church, Shrewsbury (George Steuart, 1790-92), or St. Peter’s, Walworth (John Soane, 1823-25), will be novel and enlightening. In its richness of detail, this book can also serve as a guide to social and economic aspects of the Church of England during the period in question. Thoroughly practical questions — who pays for a new building, how the financing will be arranged, where it will be located, and how big it needs to be — shed light on the worldly side of spiritual matters. Pew rents, for example, were seen as regrettable but unavoidable, given the need for funds. In booming industrial areas, congregations overflowed the space available in existing churches, but the working class could not pay for expensive new buildings. Showing how countless, now-obscure, local clergy and lay leaders responded to such challenges to create works of real beauty, Webster’s book splendidly recovers an unfairly maligned period of architectural history, and introduces readers to a set of monuments worth appreciating in their own right.

Cinema

Two films about the 2015 Coptic martyrs in Libya are raising funds: 21 Martyrs and Son of the 11th Hour. Joseph Wilson explores the Manichaeism of Yoda (Voegelin View). Anthony Sacramone reviews Film and Faith: Modern Cinema and the Struggle to Believe, edited by Micah Watson and Carson Holloway (Law & Liberty). Kyle Smith reviews Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara (The Wall Street Journal), and Amanda Fortini reflects on nuns in the movies (T Magazine).

Wildcat, the Flannery O’Connor biopic, has been praised by Jessica Hooten Wilson (Christianity Today), Fr. Damian Ference (Word on Fire), J.C. Scharl (Religion & Liberty Online), Alissa Wilkinson (The New York Times), Anthony Barr (The Dispatch), Dorian Speed (Dappled Things), Christopher J. Scalia (The Washington Free Beacon), and Nora Kenney (City Journal).

Music

Sacred Treasures of Venice is a new recording by the London Oratory Schola Cantorum (New Liturgical Movement). New reviews at Early Music America include recordings of the earliest settings of the Song of Solomon and the music of 12th-century Sicily. Agnès Poirier writes about the new bells of Notre-Dame de Paris (Engelsberg Ideas).

Dana Gioia contrasts the American composers Gian Carlo Menotti and Carlisle Floyd (The Hudson Review). The choir Tenebrae has recorded a new Requiem by American composer Michael John Trotta. Peter Holslin reconsiders New Age music (Los Angeles Review of Books).

Fiction

Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., praises David Foster Wallace as “the preeminent diagnostician of our crisis of meaning” (Humanum). In R.O. Kwon’s fiction, Ryan Lackey finds “religion and art and desire overrunning language and all its forms” (Los Angeles Review of Books). Anne Lamott discusses her new book, “a series of parables on grace” (The Guardian). Cormac McCarthy had “a fundamental optimism concerning man and the soul” (Dappled Things).

Kristin Lavransdatter was instrumental in Valerie Stivers’s conversion to Catholicism (First Things), and Nicolette Polek’s novel Bitter Water Opera inspires further reflections on conversion from Sheluyang Peng (RealClearBooks). D.H. Lawrence had “a painfully keen eye for everything that was (and still is) dead and deadening about modern religion” (Romance and Apocalypse). Cynthia Haven introduces a new collection of René Girard’s writings (Church Life Journal).

In The New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson calls The Gulag Archipelago “the masterpiece of our time,” and Mark Falcoff remembers Evelyn Waugh’s Mexico.

Other reviews of note include Joshua Hren on new translations of Flaubert (The Hedgehog Review), Richard Harries on Conversations with Dostoevsky: On God, Russia, Literature, and Life, by George Pattison (Church Times), Rowan Williams on Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me by Edith Hall (The New Statesman), and Max Egremont on A.N. Wilson’s biography of Hilaire Belloc (Literary Review). Simon Heffer reassesses G.K. Chesterton, and Joseph Pearce replies.

Danny Heitman reviews the Library of America edition of Walker Percy (The Wall Street Journal), and Peter Kwasniewski denies that Flannery O’Connor was a Teilhardian gnostic (Tradition & Sanity). Yuliia Vintoniv looks at the war in Ukraine through the eyes of C.S. Lewis and Maksym Kryvtsov (Church Life Journal). Graham McAleer sees Carl von Clausewitz’s ideas about war in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (Law & Liberty). Jesse Russell reviews James Siburt’s Myth, Magic, and Power in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (Voegelin View).

Poetry

Sally Thomas writes on “Jonathan Edwards, Walt Whitman, and the last days of natural philosophy” (Poems Ancient and Modern), Anthony Esolen on Milton’s Adam and Eve (Word & Song), and Grace Hamman on George Herbert’s “Paradise” (Medievalish).

James Matthew Wilson reviews Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment by Charles Taylor (National Review) and The Bible and Poetry by Michael Edwards (Public Discourse); Joseph Bottum reviews W.H. Auden’s The Shield of Achilles, edited by Alan Jacobs (Washington Examiner).

Anthony Domestico interviews Philip Metres (Commonweal), and Abram van Engen interviews Marilyn Nelson and Christian Wiman (The Hedgehog Review).

Newly reviewed collections include An Ordinary Life by B.H. Fairchild (Plough), The Nature of Things Fragile by Peter Vertacnik (Ad Fontes), Searching for Home by Robert Pack (Current), All Souls by Saskia Hamilton (Commonweal), Ponds by J.C. Scharl (Voegelin View), Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds by James Matthew Wilson (National Catholic Register), Old Songs by Olga Sedakova (Aleteia), and The Invention of the Darling by Li-Young Lee (Poetry Foundation).

Architecture

John Paul Sonnen profiles a new church in Cayalá, a new urban quarter of Guatemala (Liturgical Arts Journal; more about Cayalá in The New York Times). Frederick Hervey-Bathurst reviews Living Tradition: The Architecture and Urbanism of Hugh Petter by Clive Aslet (The New Criterion).

In Comment, Jason Ferris asserts “the healing power of church architecture” and Matthew J. Milliner interviews Amanda Iglesias on “the architecture of prayer.” Katie Kresser interprets Il Gesù by means of René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire (Christian Scholar’s Review).

In “The Beauty of Concrete,” Samuel Hughes demonstrates that modern building materials and economics are not incompatible with beautiful ornament (Works in Progress). Photographer Jamie McGregor Smith highlights 12 favorites from his new book, Sacred Modernity: The Holy Embrace of Modernist Architecture (Dezeen). Michael Strand argues that modern architecture is “designed to demoralize” (Front Porch Republic).

Mark Dooley places beauty at the forefront of “the battle for the soul of civilization” (Public Discourse). Peter Hitchens visits Chartres Cathedral (The Lamp). The former Byzantine Church of St. Savior in Chora has been reopened as a mosque (Catholic News Agency and National Catholic Register).

Classic Art

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has acquired 17 drawings, including Daniel’s Vision by Luigi Sabatelli and Susannah and the Elders by Guercino.

The 15th-century Brancacci Chapel in Florence (Finestre sull’Arte), the 1520 Madonna of the Cherries by Quinten Massys (Hyperallergic and Christie’s) and the 1888 Good Shepherd window from St. Stephen’s Presbyterian in Galveston, Texas (Texas Monthly), have all been newly restored.

New exhibitions include William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (Seen and Unseen), Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo at the Prado Museum in Madrid (AP News and Catholic News Agency), the Renaissance father and son Filippo and Filippino Lippi at the Capitolini Museums in Rome, The Arts in France under Charles VII, 1422–1461 at the Musée de Cluny in Paris (Apollo), A New Look at Jan van Eyck: The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, at the Louvre (The New Criterion). and Skin, Script, Spirit: Ethiopia at the Icon Museum in Massachusetts (National Catholic Reporter).

Contemporary Art

Tulio Higgins reviews The Modern Saints: Portraits and Reflections on the Saints, by Ohio Catholic iconographer Gracie Morbitzer (Fare Forward), and David Clayton praises West Virginia Orthodox iconographer Nicholas Hughes (The Way of Beauty). Greek iconographer George Kordis has posted several new works on his website, and has a new book out (both in Greek).

Ydi Coetsee Carstens introduces Gideon Nel’s The Sower, 136 (ArtWay), and Arthur Aghajanian reflects on Yervand Kochar’s 1959 sculpture of David of Sassoun in Yerevan, Armenia (Common Good). Other recent essays reconsider modern American artists Joseph Stella (Art & Theology), N.C. Wyeth (Tradition & Sanity), and Corita Kent (The Sacred Images Project). Brepols has published Revisiting the Rothko Chapel and Theology, Modernity, and the Visual Arts.

Music

Frank La Rocca’s Requiem for the Forgotten “stirs the soul” (Classical Music Sentinel and National Catholic Register), and James MacMillan’s “radiant” oratorio Fiat Lux “overwhelms and thrills” (The Times). Dan Hitchens attends the silent disco at Canterbury Cathedral (The Lamp), and Vampire Weekend’s new album is “a journey from cynicism to optimism; from skepticism to faith” (Church Life Journal).

Among the singer-songwriters: Maggie Rogers, after her viral success in music, enrolled at Harvard Divinity School, where she is now a postgraduate fellow (The New Yorker and NPR). John Moreland has produced “one of the most honest and beautiful reckonings with religious disbelief in American culture” (Image). Jeremy Camp’s memoir connects to universal themes of faith and adversity (The University Bookman). Taylor Swift has broken up with the church (Mockingbird). Waxahatchee’s new work has an elusive rootedness and an ancient oddness (Fare Forward).

In his second symphony, Mahler confronted the shock of mortality (The Imaginative Conservative). New reviews of early music include Cantata Collective’s Bach Mass in B-minor and Cut Circle’s Josquin Motets & Chansons (at Early Music America), and The Sixteen’s Masters of Imitation (at Gramophone).

Cinema

Ingmar Bergman found refuge from severe Lutheranism in puppet theater (The Wall Street Journal). Peter Tonguette beautifully eulogizes his late mother, a cinephile (The Lamp). A dialogue on the horror genre includes entries from Justin Lee, Sebastian Milbank, and Zach Parker (Theopolis).

Matthew Tan has an eschatological reading of Pixar’s 2015 Inside Out (Church Life Journal). Timothy Lawrence critiques the Christology of Martin Scorsese’s 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ (The Usual Subjects). John Ehrett follows the theme of transcendence in Darren Aronofsky’s work (First Things). Detective stories, e.g. Columbo, are a “vehicle for questions of cosmic justice” (Mockingbird).

Newly reviewed: Wildcat, Cabrini and Irena’s Vow (The Catholic World Report), and Freud’s Last Session (Religion & Liberty Online). LuElla D’Amico reflects on Cabrini and the place of women in the church (Church Life Journal).

Classic Art

Matthew Milliner’s scintillating column “Material Mysticism” has recently considered Evagrius of Pontus, Apa Aphou of Pemdje, and Midjourney’s AI images (Comment). Michelangelo’s crucifixion drawings are on view in London (The Art Newspaper). A 16th-century Mexican pax has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA Unframed).

Thirteen of the famous “Mays,” 17th-century paintings depicting the Acts of the Apostles, given annually to Notre-Dame by the Paris goldsmiths’ guild and rescued from the 2019 fire, are featured in a new show in Paris (Artnet). Poussin’s Eucharist is now at the National Gallery in London (Catholic Herald).

Angelica Aboulhosn explores Africa & Byzantium, now at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Humanities). Rebuilding Notre-Dame has bolstered French national unity (Der Spiegel). What is to be done with deconsecrated church buildings? (America). Hannah Richardson reviews Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art by Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt (Christian Scholar’s Review).

Contemporary Art

The Vatican’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale is installed in the Giudecca women’s prison (Artnet, The Guardian, National Catholic Reporter). Henri Matisse’s 1947 Chapel of the Rosary was a “spiritual adventure” (Engelsberg Ideas). The Blaue Reiter Expressionist group was concerned with spiritual authenticity (Catholic Herald).

Aliide Naylor profiles Estonian stained-glass artist Dolores Hoffmann (Meduza), Jonathan Evens interviews Matthew Askey about his Stations of the Cross in Hornsea, England (ArtWay), and the Thomas More Centre interviews Daniel Mitsui (video and transcript).

Liturgical Arts Journal appreciates the oil paintings of Raul Berzosa and the illuminated books of Edward Bulley. Image showcases Ed Fraga’s Shofar-Jesu ink paintings, as well as Meridel Rubenstein’s Eden in Iraq and other climate-change-themed art.

Musicologist Julia Dokter reproduces medieval art to learn more about music (Early Music America). Hilary White introduces iconographers George Kordis, Anthony Gunin, and Ivanka Demchuk (The Sacred Images Project).

“Sacred Arts in a Pluralistic Society: An Inter-Religious Conference” will take place online and in person May 21-23 (Vancouver School of Theology). The Bible in Photography, by Sheona Beaumont, is published by Bloomsbury.

Poetry

Robert Frost had “little in the manner of sectarian concerns across his corpus, but his verse was hardly devoid of the theological, of a sense of the numinous” (The Hedgehog Review). James Matthew Wilson surveys the work of John Finlay (The European Conservative), that of David Middleton (The Catholic World Report), and the poetry of death and resurrection (Modern Age). R.V. Young reviews Middleton’s Outside the Gates of Eden (Touchstone).

Maxim D. Shrayer reports on the results of his survey of Jewish poets and translators (Tablet), and Philip Metres and Jessica Jacobs discuss interfaith relations (Image). Joey Jekel interviews Scott Cairns (Ecstatic).

Reviews of new work include Shawn Philip Cooper on Jane Clark Scharl’s Ponds (The Catholic World Report), Mary Grace Mangano on Maryann Corbett’s The O in the Air (Literary Matters), John McEwen on Ned Denny’s Ventriloquise (Catholic Herald), and William Tate on Jane Greer’s two volumes Love Like a Conflagration and The World as We Know It Is Falling Away (Current).

Tessa Carman writes about the fourth-century poetry and creation theology of Ephrem the Syrian (Plough). Recently highlighted at Poems Ancient and Modern: “Love (III)” by George Herbert, “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau” by William Blake, and “Easter Morning” by Joseph Bottum.

W.H. Auden’s The Shield of Achilles, edited and introduced by Alan Jacobs, is published by Princeton University Press.

Contemporary Fiction

Joshua Hren interprets Eugene Vodolazkin’s philosophy of history (Church Life Journal). The Obama-era narrator of Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations has Pentecostal roots (Bookforum). James K.A. Smith reflects on the “haunted realism” of Marie NDiaye (Image).

Novelists Jordan Castro and Nicolette Polek, who are married to each other, are open about their faith. Castro says, “I’ve put my faith in Jesus Christ. And that kind of faith can be a burden” (Calendance), while for Polek, “In 2016, I became a Christian, so a lot of the things I wanted to write about changed” (Interview). Polek’s debut novel Bitter Water Opera is reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and Hobart.

In Current, Christina Bieber Lake reviews Tara Isabella Burton’s Here in Avalon, and LuElla D’Amico reviews Katy Carl’s Fragile Objects. The New York Times has articles on “the queen of Christian fiction,” Karen Kingsbury, the gay Christian characters of Allen Bratton, Daniel Lefferts, and Garrard Conley, and the apocalyptic novels of Ling Ma, Jenny Offill, and Jesmyn Ward.

Classic Fiction

Noël M. Valis writes about Don Quixote: “Cervantes shows us that in so-called ordinary life enchantment lies beneath the surface, in the forms of the imagination, which, disturbingly, also embrace delusion, obsession, and madness” (Modern Age). Joshua Cohen introduces Elias Canetti’s Quixotic Book Against Death (The Paris Review), and Rachel Sequeira reviews Gideon Rappaport’s Christian edition of Hamlet (Fare Forward).

While Cristina Campo developed a “fairy-tale mysticism” in her fiction, she became a solid Latin-Mass traditionalist after the Second Vatican Council (The Baffler). Clarice Lispector’s newly translated The Apple in the Dark is “An inversion of the Genesis creation narrative, the novel is a heretical allegory, one that seemingly undermines the whole architecture of Judeo-Christian morality” (Commonweal). Alan Jacobs reflects on Karl Barth’s appreciative 1939 letter to Dorothy L. Sayers (The Homebound Symphony). Henry James’s view of the afterlife was influenced by Spiritualism (The Hedgehog Review).

According to Gary Saul Morson, “One still astonishing fact about militantly atheist Soviet culture is that three of its greatest literary masterpieces—by Pasternak, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn—were avowedly Christian, and a fourth, Life and Fate by the Jewish writer Vasily Grossman, was equally spiritual” (First Things). Morson also writes about “the Russian idea of good and evil” (Touchstone). Julianna Leachman attempts to practice a Dostoevskian pedagogy (Christian Scholar’s Review).

Jerome C. Foss has reservations about Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage? (Law & Liberty), which will be the subject of an online seminar in June (Collegium Institute). Joel J. Miller reviews Mark Noll’s C.S. Lewis in America (Miller’s Book Review), Isaiah Flair reviews J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters (The University Bookman), and Stefan Kaminski finds a Harrowing of Hell in Tolkien’s Return of the King (Catholic Herald).

Music

Fugue State Films is raising money for Lighten Our Darkness, a film about choral Evensong. John Ahern critiques both eclecticism (Theopolis) and alienation (The Lamp) in music. Harry Rose unpacks Verdi’s complicated relationship with Catholicism in La forza del destino (Commonweal).

Josh Rodriguez interviews Julian Davis Reid about “Black music as cross-cultural medicine for the soul” (The Big Picture), Michael Buhler has a Lenten reflection on Nina Simone’s 1965 “Sinnerman” (Voegelin View), and Dave Holmes interviews Scott Stapp about the resurgence of his rock band, Creed (Esquire).

Tyler Cowen interviews Masaaki Suzuki, whose Bach Collegium Japan regularly offers 30 performances of the St. Matthew Passion each Holy Week (Conversations with Tyler), Charles T. Downey reviews The Thirteen’s performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor (Washington Classical Review), and Jennifer Voster appreciates Fanny Mendelssohn’s long-lost Easter Sonata (Commonweal).

Kate Quiñones previews Frank La Rocca’s new Requiem for the Forgotten (Catholic News Agency), James Davy reviews Pax Aeterna, a collaboration between pianist Tom Donald and the Benedictine monks of Pluscarden Abbey (Catholic Herald), and Joseph Pearce interviews composer Michael Kurek (The Imaginative Conservative).

Cinema

Jaspreet Singh Boparai reviews Werner Herzog’s memoir: “Traveling on foot has a kind of spiritual significance for him that he has never been able fully to explain” (Quillette).

“Poor Things is an unwitting argument for the Victorian era, at least as a preferable alternative to whatever carved-up, drugged-out techno-hellscape awaits us” (Rejoice Evermore). “Luis Buñuel, raised Catholic in an intensely God-fearing part of Spain, was endlessly fascinated by the ‘voluptuous’ powers of sinful sex” (4Columns).

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune duology offers an anti-heroic anti-myth (U.S. Catholic), echoes of the original Manichaean synthesis (The American Conservative), a dilemma between despotism and fanaticism (The New York Times), a sterile, desacralized cosmos (Tablet), figures of fatherly love (Mockingbird), and lessons in human dignity, prudence, and moderation (Law & Liberty).

Michael Lockshin’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita has met with both popular success and official denunciation (Literary Hub). Why are there so many nuns in horror movies? asks Carino Hodder (The Lamp).

Nick Ripatrazone introduces Ric Burns’s new two-part documentary, Dante (Humanities). Cabrini, Alejandro Monteverde’s biopic of the missionary saint, secularizes its subject (Catholic Culture) and mutes her spirituality (National Review). Protestant-Catholic conflict shapes the background of Shōgun (Slate).

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon contrasts sacred and secular approaches to death (The Point). Scorsese is working on a Jesus film (The Film Stage) and a docudrama about eight saints (Variety). Christian Barnard identifies several aspects of the brilliance of Terrence Malick (The Big Picture), who is working on a Jesus film of his own (The Film Stage).

Architecture

Andrew Cusack praises Immanuel on the Green in New Castle, Delaware, “the most beautifully situated colonial church in America.” James Stevens Curl reviews An Architectural History of the Church of Ireland (The Critic), and Clive Aslet reviews Gavin Stamp’s history of interwar British architecture (Engelsberg Ideas).

Benjamin Riley reviews The History of England’s Cathedrals by Nicholas Orme (The Wall Street Journal). William Newton (The Spectator) reflects on the almost-finished restoration of Notre Dame de Paris, which has recently received a new spire and golden rooster (Smithsonian Magazine). In Barcelona, Sagrada Familia will be finished in 2026 (CNN).

Martin C. Pedersen interviews Peter Pennoyer, winner of the 2024 Driehaus Prize, otherwise ignored by the architectural press (Common Edge), Catesby Leigh advocates the rebuilding of Penn Station (Claremont Review of Books), and David Schaengold calls for architectural heroism (Compact).

Shawn Tribe tours Santa Maria Novella in Florence (Liturgical Arts Journal), and Jamie McGregor Smith has a new photo book of brutalist churches in Europe (The Guardian).

Classic Poetry

The last lines of Tu Fu (712-70) are “rich with resignation, though still exquisitely Taoist/Ch’an in their apprehension of the oceanic existence-fabric” (Poetry Foundation). Lynda Kong approaches the sacred through the poetry of Wang Wei (699-759), T.S. Eliot, Geoffrey Hill, and John Burnside (Mockingbird). Baukje van den Berg investigates what Homer meant to the Byzantines (Antigone).

Edward Howells reviews The Spring that Feeds the Torrent: Poems by St. John of the Cross, translated by Rhina P. Espaillat (Ad Fontes). Mark Edmundson uses Milton’s Satan to interpret the godlike powers of AI (First Things), and Andrew Klavan holds up King Lear and The Tempest against the transhumanist temptation (City Journal). Phil Christman interviews Alan Jacobs about W.H. Auden’s Shield of Achilles (The Tourist).

Contemporary Poetry

In Somaliland, poetry is politically and socially consequential (Noēma). Samuel Hazo offers a three-part argument for the relevance of poetry to modern life (Genealogies of Modernity).

Brad East writes that “Of apophasis in all its varieties, Christian Wiman is a poet without living peer” (Comment), and Nick Ripatrazone praises the wit and depth of Maryann Corbett’s The O in the Air (Catholic Herald).

Ben Palpant’s new series of interviews with poets begins with Luci Shaw and Scott Cairns (Rabbit Room Poetry). James Matthew Wilson rebuts Matthew Walther’s claim that poetry is dead (The European Conservative) and is interviewed by Kelsey Marie Bowse about his work (The University Bookman).

Classic Fiction

Jonathan Geltner places Thoreau’s Easter sermon in context (Romance and Apocalypse), David Mikics considers the prophetic Emerson (Tablet), Sarah Clark critiques the Transcendentalist response to death (Fare Forward), and Ian Olson offers qualified approval to Thoreau’s attack on Christian orthodoxy (Plough).

Is Dickens too sentimental? Robert Wyllie attacks (The Lamp), and Michael Warren Davis defends (Theologoumenalia). The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) portrays Catholic ecclesiology from the outside (Church Life Journal), and Gary Saul Morson introduces a new graphic novel of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (Plough).

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson assembles and analyzes the clues in the matter of Agatha Christie’s faith (Mockingbird), and Timothy Larsen tells the story of H.G. Wells’s conversion (Current). Sam Woodward traces the influence of H.P. Lovecraft’s “cosmic indifferentism” (Aeon); despite his atheism and misanthropy, Lovecraft had inadvertent Christian impulses (Voegelin View).

Iris Murdoch came to fiction via existentialist philosophy (The American Scholar); Sigrid Undset’s The Wild Orchid portrays the “spiritual confusion of early 20th-century Europe (The Imaginative Conservative). In Ulysses, “Life might not be eternal but it can be wonderfully agreeable as long as it lasts …. the lucky denizens of the 20th-century world are free to enjoy an innocence that has been denied mankind since the Biblical Fall” (Claremont Review of Books).

Both Mircea Eliade (The Imaginative Conservative) and René Girard (Touchstone) ground literature in the metaphysical. Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed sees “rationalistic utilitarianism as the logical development of the Pelagian heresy” (First Things), and Sophia Belloncle makes a Christological reading of The Once and Future King (Voegelin View).

The medieval works that fascinated Tolkien the philologist encourage “the displacement of our typical worldly desires toward an often-slippery love of God” (Church Life Journal). Sally Thomas (Religion & Liberty Online) and Joshua Hren (Dappled Things) review Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress, by Jessica Hooten Wilson, and Chuck Chalberg reviews Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art, by Father Damian Ference (The Imaginative Conservative).

Contemporary Fiction

In Jane Clark Scharl’s murder mystery Sonnez Les Matines, Loyola, Calvin, and Rabelais try to reconcile “the reality of a redemptive God, a Word made flesh, with the utter alienation of the material world” (Religion & Liberty Online). Katy Carl’s Fragile Objects appropriates Virginia Woolf’s methods and insights for a fuller vision of beauty (National Catholic Register).

Daniele Mencarelli’s The House of Gazes “is a profusely optimistic novel that will challenge even the most determined nihilist” (RealClearBooks). The characters in Mathias Énard’s The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild experience metempsychosis, as their souls transmigrate at death into new humans or animals (The Nation). In Tara Isabella Burton’s Here in Avalon, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Fairie’s amoral realm beyond good and evil doesn’t afford the chance of being good” (First Things).

Patrick Deneen limns the Reagan-era existential angst of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (Sacred and Profane Love); DeLillo’s work has a “theological warmth,” proving the inadequacy of secular axioms (N+1 Magazine).

Nick Ripatrazone considers Alexander Sammartino’s debut novel Last Acts in light of Pietro di Donato’s classic Christ in Concrete (The Bulwark). T.M. Doran’s “Orwellian noir” Seeing Red is concerned with human dignity and the value of every human life (Catholic World Report).

Blake Butler’s Molly “seems haunted by God, even though nobody in it is obviously a practicing or believing Christian” (First Things). Jamie Quatro’s characters do things like “leave their Presbyterian congregations to join nature-worship cults with sexual initiation rites” (The Paris Review).

Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis is reviewed in The Guardian, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Telegraph, Plough, Fare Forward, and Marginalia Review of Books. Robinson is interviewed on The Ezra Klein Show, and her “five best books on faith” include the Theologica Germanica and John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (The Wall Street Journal).

Classic Art

In London, the small but precious Francesco Pesellino exhibition highlights David and Goliath (The Guardian), St. Mamas as a sign of 15th-century Christian unity (Church Times), the journey of King Melchior to the Holy Land (The Wall Street Journal), and the artist’s overall excellence and mastery (Apollo).

Jeff Reimer reviews Jeannie Marshall’s non-Christian book on the Sistine Chapel (Commonweal), while Wayne Kalayjian’s book on the dome of St. Peter’s is reviewed by Cammy Brothers (The Wall Street Journal) and Ingrid Rowland (The American Scholar). Sarah Tillard reflects on Paul Delaroche’s 1833 depiction of the beheading of Lady Jane Grey, Protestant martyr (Voegelin View).

Now on view: Jan van Eyck’s freshly restored Madonna of Chancellor Rolin at the Louvre, Sacred Presence: Virgin of Kazan in Massachusetts, and a 15th-century limewood sculpture of Jesse in Cleveland.

Painter Gwen John turned to God after breaking up with Rodin (The University Bookman), and sculptor Elisabeth Frink wanted to “do away with the bambino” in the name of the human spirit (Catholic Herald). Megan Buskey reviews the New York retrospective of renowned Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko (Commonweal).

In the midst of grief, Lanta Davis traveled to Station Island, Ireland, to see Harry Clarke’s stained-glass windows there (Plough). Hermione Eyre praises Pop artist Joe Tilson’s window in the 15th-century gothic Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland (Apollo).

William Newton concludes that “in his imperfect, weird way, Dalí was trying to understand something that is perfect, something that represents pure love, something so deeply beautiful in itself, mere created beings cannot fully grasp it” (The Spectator).

Contemporary Art

Margaret Adams Parker introduces her letterpress book of Saint Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures (Vita Poetica), and Gareth Harris interviews Anselm Kiefer about his new exhibition Fallen Angels (The Art Newspaper). In ArtWay, Scott Rayl appreciates an Annunciation panel by Nigerian carver Lamidi O. Fakeye, and Anikó Ouweneel gives the spiritual background of Alevi Muslim artist Güler Ates.

John P. Burgess explores the iconography of Fr. Zinon (Orthodox Arts Journal), and Hilary White explains the iconographic prototype (The Sacred Images Project). Reflections on sacred art are offered by David Clayton, Margarita Mooney Clayton, and Roseanne T. Sullivan.

Louise Giovanelli is now an atheist, but her painting remains steeped in religion (The New York Times). Amy Mantravadi reconsiders Edwina Sandys’s 1984 sculpture Christa at St. John the Divine (Sub-Creations). Catherine Opie’s photographs take a critical view of the Vatican (ARTNews and Financial Times).

Protests have greeted Martin Jennings’s Jane Austen statue at Winchester Cathedral (The Guardian), Shazia Sikander’s Witness at the University of Houston (Hyperallergic), and Andrea Saltini’s sexually explicit exhibition at Sant’Ignazio in Carpi (Daily Compass and Barron’s). Joshua Katz objects to the removal of Alexander Stoddart’s 2001 John Witherspoon monument at Princeton (Law & Liberty), and Christopher R. Altieri objects to the Vatican’s continued patronage of Marko Rupnik (Catholic World Report).

Music

Compared to the music of Haydn and Mozart, that of Dieterich Buxtehude is “earlier and earthier, with a sense of spiritual mystery and wonder at the order and workings of the cosmos” (The Imaginative Conservative). Sergei Rachmaninoff was a faithful Orthodox Christian (Washington Examiner). An “electrifying” recording of James Brown “ignited [the] religious imagination” of Matt Austerklein, inspiring his interpretation of the Jewish High Holidays liturgies (Beyond the Music).

The Benedict XVI Choir and Orchestra are releasing a new recording of Frank La Rocca’s Requiem for the Forgotten-Messe des Malades (Cappella Records), and Victoria Emily Jones reviews recordings of Celtic, jazz, and choral vespers (Art and Theology).

“Opera was sheer depravity, witchcraft so strong it crossed language barriers—a foul and foreign vice only Catholics could have devised,” writes Dana Gioia (The Hudson Review). The true purpose of ballet might be “movement as ‘physical prayer,’ an offering of self to something greater” (The Hedgehog Review). A silent disco held in Canterbury Cathedral has met with protests (The Guardian and The Critic).

Cinema

The Nigerian film industry’s fascination with the occult is set against a background of thriving Pentecostalism (New Lines Magazine). Sacred Alaska is a new documentary about the interweaving of Eastern Orthodox traditions and indigenous beliefs (YouTube). Inshallah a Boy tells the story of a Muslim nurse who works for a Christian family in Amman (Too Much Art).

Asteroid City “explores the empathic power of art, the questioning frontiers of science, and the philosophical necessity of religion, while revealing the limited and humble domain of each” (Providence), while Person of Interest examines human-machine tensions in the AI era (Law & Liberty).

About Marlene Dietrich, John Byron Kuhner writes that “Old age is the training God gives us as he prepares us for death, which, if we accept it, can be a glorious homeward journey” (First Things). Joseph Holmes reflects on Oppenheimer and pessimism (Religion & Liberty Online).

Michael Parsons makes a case for the biblical symbolism in Dune (The Symbolic World), Leila Miller denounces the “false Christ” of The Chosen (Crisis Magazine), and Peter Tonguette weighs the balance of ennoblement and depravity in Reacher (Religion & Liberty Online).

In Church Life Journal, LuElla D’Amico writes on Barbie and creation, and Patrick Gray on The Book of Clarence and Gnosticism.

Classic Poetry

David McBride introduces his translation of “Claf Abercuawg,” a ninth-century Welsh poem written from a leper’s point of view (Plough), Langdon Hammer introduces Edgar Garcia’s translations of the Cantares Mexicanos, ghostly voices of a lost civilization (The American Scholar), and Thomas Jacobi introduces The Dazzling Light of God: A Madeleine Delbrêl Reader (Catholic World Report).

Art Kavanagh looks at the relation of matter and spirit in Milton’s Paradise Lost (Talk About Books), Pedro Blas Gonzalez investigates spirit and essence in Wordsworth’s Prelude (Voegelin View), and Daegan Miller writes about the enthusiasm of Transcendentalist mystic Jones Very (Poetry Foundation).

Although cagey about his views, Shakespeare contrasts “naive and instinctive” religion with the “instrumental, hypocritical, and self-interested” variety, writes Theodore Dalrymple (New English Review). Dante’s Virgil is a good model for college professors to follow (Front Porch Republic).

Contemporary Poetry

“Attention is the only path to mystery” (Commonweal), and “The degree to which one engages in prayer coincides with one’s capacity for poetry” (Word on Fire).

Gerald O’Collins remembers the relationship between Seamus Heaney and Peter Steele, the “Australian George Herbert” (Quadrant). Helen Rouner reflects on Auden and mortality (Commonweal). Richard Michelson’s Sleeping as Fast as I Can is full of Jewish spiritual humor and heartbreak (The Jerusalem Post).

James Matthew Wilson interprets John Finlay’s Catholic critique of modern Gnosticism (Catholic World Report) and discusses his own new poem “Obsessed” (Shadowlands Dispatch). Sally Thomas compares J.A. Baker and Gerard Manley Hopkins on birds (Poems Ancient and Modern).

New reviews include Tessa Carman on Claude Wilkinson’s Soon Done with the Crosses (Fare Forward), Jeffrey Bilbro on Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone (Front Porch Republic) Ian Olson on Wiman (Mockingbird), Alex Taylor on David Craig’s Jesus in the Minnows: A Catholic Beat Memoir (The University Bookman), David Deavel on two books by Regina Derieva (The Imaginative Conservative), and Ethan McGuire on To Heaven’s Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Christian Poetry (Voegelin View).

Classic Fiction

At The Homebound Symphony, Alan Jacobs writes about the relationship between law, freedom, repetition, and suffering in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, and the enormous power that a single copy of Thomas a Kempis holds within the narrative of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Tara Isabella Burton reflects on original sin and the striving for “originality” in an 1876 French short story (Luke Burgis).

The Genealogies of Modernity podcast presents a dialogue between Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace on modernity, with responses by Daniel Zimmerman, Katy Carl, and Luke Foster. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has a warning against immortality (Law & Liberty).

Dostoevsky’s The Idiot has a sober Christian hope for eucatastrophe (The Unexpected Journal), and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin offers a prophecy of love against malaise and acedia (Voegelin View).

In the merciless, feudal world of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, a priest says, “It’s not enough to be good. Sin is wrong. And to get rid of it, you have to be tough, even ruthless” (The Nation).

Bonnie Lander Johnson and Julia Meszaros argue for the recovery and relevance of lost Catholic women novelists (First Things), Walker Percy refutes Carl Sagan’s naïve scientism (New English Review), and Christopher McCaffery surveys the work of Gene Wolfe (The Lamp). Bernard Malamud’s novels and stories are classics of Jewish Americana (The Nation).

In Law & Liberty, Tyler Hummel reviews Mark Noll’s C.S. Lewis in America and Henry T. Edmondson III reviews The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Andrew Seeley regards The Lord of the Rings as “a song of merciful Providence” (Arts of Liberty). The widespread “grimdark” school of fantasy writing is a reaction against Tolkien’s overwhelming legacy (The Critic).

The canon offers students “what they really need, namely, a coherent whole, a meaningful past, a lofty universe that will make them proud to join” (Public Discourse).

Contemporary Fiction

Marilynne Robinson introduces her new book, Reading Genesis, in Commonweal; she is interviewed in The New York Times Magazine, and the book is reviewed in The Atlantic. Alice McDermott’s new novel, Absolution, is reviewed in Commonweal and The New York Review.

Peco Gaskovski is interviewed about his novel Exogenesis: “Blade Runner meets the Amish” (Catholic World Report).

In Flannery O’Connor’s sacramental theory of fiction, Trevor Cribben Merrill found a solution to the novelist’s problem of mimetic desire (Writing Fiction After Girard). Rose Lyddon reviews Tara Isabella Burton’s Here in Avalon (Cracks in Postmodernity), and Louis Markos reviews Winston Brady’s The Inferno (The Imaginative Conservative).

Architecture

At Theopolis, the dialogue on architecture and urbanism initiated by Philip Bess continues with contributions from Peter Leithart, Eric Ivers, Matthew Niermann, and Susannah Black Roberts.

An exhibition about Notre Dame de Paris is at Westminster Abbey (Catholic Herald). John Hutton’s glass engravings at Guildford Cathedral have been damaged by vandals (English Cathedrals). The synthronon is a distinctive feature of early church architecture (Liturgical Arts Journal).

Amanda Patchin reviews Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building (Front Porch Republic), Witold Rybczynski remembers Radoslav Zuk, architect of many Ukrainian Catholic churches in Winnipeg, and Andrew Cusack points to Whitechapel Library as a suitable reuse for a former church building.

The Chora Church in Istanbul will become a mosque (The Sacred Images Project and Catholic World Report). Africa’s largest mosque has been opened in Algiers, with an 869-foot minaret, a prayer room for 120,000 people, and library space for 1 million books (Associated Press).

Classic Art

Ioana Belcea explores the richness of Anglo-Saxon liturgical manuscripts (Dappled Things), Charles Barber reviews Africa and Byzantium in New York (The Burlington Magazine), and Victoria Emily Jones reviews Ethiopia at the Crossroads in Baltimore (Art and Theology).

Melody Bellefeuille-Frost meditates upon ‘Our Lady of the Snows,’ a Jesuit hanging scroll made in Japan around the year 1600 (ArtWay). “Why does stained glass make us so happy?” asks Nicole Kliest (Coveteur).

For his 250th birthday, Caspar David Friedrich is reviewed by Peter E. Gordon (The New Statesman) and Catherine Hickey (The Art Newspaper). Arthur Aghajanian praises William Blake (Plough) and Armenian civic sculpture (The Hedgehog Review).

Curator Koen Bulckers highlights Rembrandt’s Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem in a Dublin exhibition (Apollo). Other new Old Master exhibitions include Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Holbein.

Two 18th-century Cuzco School paintings have been returned to Peru (Manhattan District Attorney’s Office), and Westminster Abbey has agreed to return a sacred tablet to Ethiopia (The Guardian). The Colossus of Constantine has been reconstructed in Rome (artnet), Orsanmichele has reopened in Florence (The Florentine), and a Cimabue fresco has been restored in Assisi (Aleteia).

Contemporary Art

Jonathan Anderson reviews Faith in Art, by former Artforum editor Joseph Masheck, which treats the work of “An Orthodox Kandinsky, a Protestant Mondrian, a Catholic Malevich, and a Jewish Lissitzky” (Artforum).

Kathleen Carr discusses the Catholic Art Institute and its Sacred Art Prize (National Catholic Register). Benedictine College has a call for paintings of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, and Christian Art will award £25,000 for the inaugural Laudamus Prize.

The Artistic Sphere: The Arts in Neo-Calvinist Perspective has been published by IVP Academic, and the journal Image is closing after 35 years.

Hannah Rose Thomas introduces Tears of Gold, her portraits of Rohingya, Yazidi, and other women survivors of violence (Plough and Culture Care), and Otto Dam mediates on Silvia Dimitrova’s painting of Miriam (ArtWay). Black iconographer Mark Doox has published a new book of his work (The New York Times).

Hilary White explains philokalia, the love of beauty (The Sacred Images Project), and David Clayton contrasts two approaches to painting the Christian story (The Way of Beauty).

Critical reflections on AI and art are offered by David Clayton, Daniel Mitsui, and Joseph Pronechen.

In Los Angeles, The Fowler Museum has a survey of contemporary Sikh art (ARTnews) and the Getty Center’s exhibition Blood combines medieval and modern works (The Art Newspaper).

Salustiano Garcia’s painting of Jesus, made for Seville’s Holy Week, has attracted protests (The Pillar), and Hilary White critiques the “soulless” work of artist Marko Rupnik (The Sacred Images Project).