James Matthew Wilson

James Matthew Wilson
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James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from art, ethics, and politics, to meter and poetic form, from the importance of local culture to the nature of truth, goodness, and beauty. Wilson is also a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, and The American Conservative. He has published five books, including most recently, a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). Raised in the Great Lakes State, baptised in the parish of St. Thomas Aquinas, seasoned by summers on Lake Wawasee (Indiana), and educated under the Golden Dome, Wilson is scion of a family of Hoosiers dating back to the early nineteenth century, and an offspring of Southside Chicago Poles whose tavern kept the city wet through the Depression (and prohibition) years.  He now lives under the same sentence of reluctant exile as many another native son of the Midwest, but has dug himself in for good on the margins of the Main Line in Pennsylvania with his beautiful wife, dangerous daughter, and saintly sons. For information on Wilson's scholarship and a selection of his published work, click here. See books written and recommended by James Matthew Wilson.

Recent Essays

Contracepting Cultural Memory

R.J. Snell writes, "Contraception is already so normalized in our society that its use is presumed for both married and unmarried alike; in fact, so normalized is contraception that its use is thought not only responsible but even obligatory."

A Tenancy of Will

Your body’s yours, just as this poem is mine: to make, destroy—a tenancy of will, for every citizen and concubine.

Personality, Conversion, and Being: On John Paul II’s “Fides et Ratio”

The Reader Objects!: If God is Personal and Loving above all, if the Christian believes reason is fundamentally preceded by what is revealed in Faith, then what grounds has the Christian for speaking to the non-Christian? What hope for meaningful dialogue have we if Caritas precedes and envelops all?

Gratuitous Foundations: Benedict XVI’s Humanism of the Gift, Part II

Benedict's encyclical responds to the elite technocrats of the liberal order more charitably than they deserve. It is true that, in mundane circumstances, liberal society often professes a congenial relativism, and it is equally true that the technocrats of modern charity—who discover the redemption of man in contraception, efficient abortion, and maximized “private” freedom with neither self-government nor moral judgment—reject the identity of “Agápe and Lógos”, the “God of the Bible” who is “Charity and Truth, Love and Word.” But this does not mean they lack a conception of truth or that they are in fact mere sentimental relativists. They rather advocate an immanent and materialist absolute.

Gratuitous Foundations: Benedict XVI’s Humanism of the Gift, Part I

Benedict XVI's first social encyclical, "Caritas in Veritate," challenges long-accepted understandings of the relation of faith and reason and of charity and justice. In so doing, he not only calls into question the failed rationalism and failed conceptions of ownership that have done so much to harm and misshape the modern west; he also revises the Catholic Church's social doctrine, in some respects drawing it away from its origin in the neo-Scholastic political theory of Leo XIII, while in others renewing and strengthening the profound continuity of the Church's Gospel message.

Beating Back the Alien Dark

In 2007, we bought a house and moved to Greenville, North Carolina. Here, I recall the first rough day of home ownership, topped off by John Wayne and cold wine.

The Culture of Atomic Eros and the Hatred of the Church

It is time to consider what the latest uproar against Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church tells us about the state of our society. It is an ugly truth: the reordering of western society to the one imperative of sexual fulfillment. But, ultimately, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, we shall die not of decadence but of boredom.

My First Book Published At Last

"Four Verse Letters" has just appeared from the Franciscan University at Steubenville Press.

Hot Tub Economics

The ideology of free trade and managed society continues to destroy the prospects of a prosperous American in the Twenty-First Century. Let us dig down and return to the one true economics: making and acquiring for the sake of sustaining the household and the country.

Milliner on Wilson, Wilson on Gioia: Catholic Intellectuals and Modern Culture

Matthew J. Milliner explicates "Art and Beauty," while Dana Gioia wins Notre Dame's Laetare Medal

The End of Beauty — And We’re Not Talking Teleologically Here!

The concluding installment of "Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic" has appeared on First Principles, a series of essays begun in hopes of analyzing and reforming American conservatism as it exists in our day.

T.S. Eliot on Community and Belief

I shall be giving a lecture on Eliot and Stoicism next week; FPR readers are invited.