Fundamentally Religious and Catholic
Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway. Word on Fire Academic, 2023. Hardcover, 532 pages, $ 34.95. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz. J. R. R. Tolkien famously described The Lord of the Rings as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”...
These Roman Things
David Jones and Rome: Reimagining the Decline of Western Civilization by Jasmine Hunter Evans. Oxford University Press, 2022. Hardcover, 432 pages, $115. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz. In 1964, poet-painter David Jones lamented changes underway in the Roman Catholic...
A Singular Universal
The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene. W. W. Norton, 2021. Hardcover, xvi + 591 pp., $40. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz Jean-Paul Sartre once classified Gustave Flaubert as a “singular universal.” For Sartre, such a writer’s oeuvre becomes a...
‘These Global Days’
The Grail Mass and Other Works by David Jones. Ed. Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Hardcover, xi + 279 pp., $176. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz David Jones (1895–1974) opens his modern epic, The Anathemata (1952), by quoting the Historia...
"Don Quixote makes life the protagonist. The affirmation of life is truly Don Quixote’s quest. The venerable knight-errant seeks more than life from his life." — Pedro Blas Gonzalez.
Melissa Lane is one of many left-liberal thinkers seeking a middle ground between “canceling” great thinkers and those in the New Right who seek to co-opt them for their postliberal vision. - Jesse Russell