On Looking for What We Have Been Given

by | Mar 28, 2016

“Giving one Catholicity, God deprives one of the pleasure of looking for it but here again He has shown His mercy for such a one as myself … who, if it had not been given, would not have looked.” —Flannery O’Connor, September 24, 1947, from A Prayer Journal (2013)A...

The Many Dimensions of Charles Williams

by | Mar 27, 2016

Charles Williams: The Third Inkling by Grevel Lindop. Oxford University Press, 2015. Cloth, xx + 493 pp., $35.Acclaimed in his day by the likes of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams (1886–1945) suffered a...

On Play and Seriousness

by | Mar 27, 2016

Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga. Beacon, 1950.“We must emphasize once again that play does not exclude seriousness.” —Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1938. The classical Latin adjectives that we see associated with the Latin noun...

Judges and Dons

by | Mar 21, 2016

Divergent Paths: The Academy and the Judiciary by Richard Posner. Harvard University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 432 pages, $30.For a still-active judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit who “moonlights” as a law professor, Richard Posner is oddly and...

Memory and Mythmaking

by | Mar 21, 2016

The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945 (Citizens and Soldiers) By Nicholas Stargardt Basic Books, 2015. Hardcover, 704 pp., $35. At the end of 1999, Time named Albert Einstein as “Person of the Century.” At a New Year’s Eve celebration held in a German castle...