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

Conservative Prosody

The turning of the plow in the dark fields and the turning of verses on a white field of paper are more than etymologically related.

Talkin’ Pauken

At last, true localist and traditional voice from the land of Ron Paul and George Bush.

The Population Bomb

Not with a bang, but a whimper . . .

The Best Foreign Policy is No Foreign Policy

Or, Domestic policy is the only policy.

The New First Principles

A familiar web journal gets a new look and new mission.

Stephen Hawking Proves the Existence of God

Obfuscating language and philosophical ignorance do not prevent Hawking from suggesting that modern physics confirms Christian cosmology. Nature really does conform to uncreated law.

True Education against the Death of Man

Can the blight of modern reductive thinking and living be overcome by humanistic education? Newman thought so; so does Villanova.

Fired for the Natural Law, Part II: Toward a Marriage of Natures

Our conception of nature is too thin, too reliant upon the conceptions of the ancient Stoics, and so requires the more robust visions of Aristotle and Aquinas if moral debate is not to become intractable.

Fired for the Natural Law, Part I: Against the Laws of Nature

The precincts of higher education have become so well known for their enormities and absurdities in the pursuit of political correctness that one may almost breeze past the latest episode at the University of Illinois—Champaign/Urbana. There, Kenneth Howell, an adjunct associate professor , has been fired for “hate speech.”

Roger Ebert on the Visceral Beauty of Chicago Architecture

In architecture I am a reactionary.

An Homage to Chesterton

For Chesterton the birds of nature were always singing about the rightness of things and so softly correcting modern man’s unnatural despair of the created order and his egregious confidence that he could create by artifice a more perfect order in deliberate violation of the old one.

Of Humility and Gratitude: Dana Gioia at Notre Dame

Dana Gioia's brief but worthy address at Notre Dame.