The Nightstand

Even Rosa the respectable sociologist entertains the possibility that if we relearned how to listen, the mountains might speak. Perhaps they too have their spirits, mute but waiting.

Antonin Scalia’s judicial legacy was ratified on June 24, 2022 as the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

As someone who squirms every time I see a couple or family all quietly tapping their cell phones, a room of twenty people talking is a beautiful sight. It is easy to despair at our polarized and atomized society, but I appreciate Gray’s book for giving a clear, achievable step for building community and making friends.

One cannot really have a book about conversation alone. Conversation is so much a fruit of individual persons and their relationship to one another, that a book about that fruit must be one about how to become a deeper, better, more complex and interesting person.

I was encouraged by Sosler and all the many ways he connected love and knowledge to the journey that a rightly ordered education invites students to take. The infilling of knowledge and wisdom is a gift of God, and Sosler is a welcome guide, the best of docents, for students and educators alike.

Contemporary sensibilities tend to prefer the nihilist abyss to such salvation, even as we pathetically pursue the latest "cure" for that emptiness—be that radical politics, surgical revisions to our anatomy, or compassionate medical assistance in dying. It looks patronizingly at best and with hostility at worst, at the idea that our modern despair should prompt some deep rethinking.

Was it his commitment to truth in art that ultimately preserved his faith? Perhaps—God may have worked in that mysterious way. He seemed, late in life, to come to an acceptance, a peace, and he embraced more fully his Catholic faith. In the end, he went quietly, full of years, absolved.

To hear that message of tough love for which he seems to be yearning, those who represent the church to Bono will have to have the courage to break through the aura of celebrity and invite a searcher into the true home he is looking for.

Here is what Seren of the Wildwood has done for me: it’s rekindled my love of narrative poetry. Once I have read several of my old favourites, I’ll read it again, and then I’ll move on to the rest of Youmans' work. In the meantime, dear reader, put your order into Wiseblood Books and get to reading the instant your copy of Seren of the Wildwood arrives.

The need to reconcile with one’s finitude and live as good a life in light of this was made clear by many of the more successful essays and tallied with my own experience of coming to terms with the limits on my life from my condition, both in an everyday and an ultimate sense.