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

Deracinated Meritocrats and the Marriage “Debate”

Devon, PA.  I just received a link to a video that records the encounter of members of the TFP (The American Society for the...

History’s Long Road to Tyranny: Tocqueville and the End of Equality

Devon, PA. I have just finished teaching Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America with my freshmen students.  In a way I have not witnessed...

Wilson at Steubenville

Devon, PA.  All you who are in the Pittsburg/eastern Ohio region would be most welcome at the talking and reading I shall give this...

Stoic Sex in Evanston

Tucson, AZ. One of the pleasing genres of contemporary journalism is the coverage of bizarre happenings in academe that shock the sensibility of the...

Your Justice Is My Pay Check

Tucson, AZ. Far from my native Midwest, which sometimes seems to be working out the details of its final collapse after decades of decline,...

T.S. Eliot Week

My Eliot week, I should say. All Readers of good will are welcome to join in the talk fest.

For Craft and Country: Richard Wakefield’s Eminent Domain

Richard Wakefield’s book of poems takes its place as one more important and hard-won advance in the restoration of good poetry to our culture.

The Wilson Winter Tour

I may be holding forth on a porch near you. All ye of good will are invited.

What Is Wrong with Contemporary Intellectuals?

"Intellectual" and "Disinterested," as we use them, are new words. I "prefer" old words: Scholar, Monk, Contemplative, Lover of Wisdom.

That Endless Enlightenment

Academic leftists and conservative critics of academe are united in a fundamental proposition, says Stanley Fish. True enough, say I: education is endless and the world is a nauseating abyss.

Local Beer, Rhyming Poets

Seven poets, including your humble author, descend upon Victory Brewing Company this coming Sunday to test the compatibility of Hops and Hopkins.

Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve

From "Tran-sexual" Hoosier Street Vandals to the pinched daughters of Margaret Sanger and on to the Supreme Court of California, "the new sexual inversion demands recognition, even when there are no grounds for this recognition."