Posts Tagged ‘tragedy’
Nowhere to Hide: Reflections in the Aftermath of the Tree of Life Mass Killings
November 7, 2018
Every December and May at commencement, I listen to the names of our graduates as they are called out one by one. As I hear them, I think, maybe? Could be. Has to be! How did I not get to know her? Yes, I know him. Yes, I know her. They’ve come to my house…
Read MoreHappy Halloween: Remember You Will Die
October 31, 2018
This week we are delighted to welcome Jessica Mesman as Good Letters’ new editor. “Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.” ― Muriel Spark, Memento Mori It’s dark this morning. Sunrise comes later over the cornfield. The maple outside my window is yellowing,…
Read MoreThe Beauty Dialogues, Part 3
April 4, 2017
Today Morgan Meis continues his periodic exchanges with Image founder Gregory Wolfe. Dear Greg, Thanks for your response to my latest “challenge,” as you put it, on the question of beauty. I love all the things you have to say and find myself both moved and convinced by the nuanced, complicated version of beauty you’ve…
Read MoreThe Beauty Dialogues, Part 2
March 16, 2017
The following is a response to Morgan Meis’s letter posted yesterday. Dear Morgan: Thanks for throwing down this particular gauntlet. Yes, we adopted Dostoevsky’s phrase from The Idiot, where one of the characters attributes the saying “beauty will save the world” to the eponymous hero of the novel, Prince Myshkin. I’m well aware that any…
Read MoreAnne Fontaine’s The Innocents
February 15, 2017
After World War II devastated eastern Europe, the Red Army pushed into the countries allotted to them as spoils, such as Poland. There, they continued the destructive work that the Nazis had begun. Among those hardest hit were the women religious of Warsaw. French Red Cross physician Madeleine Pauliac, sent to find and repatriate the…
Read MoreMy September 11, and Ours: Part I
September 12, 2016
We knew in an instant everything about our lives had changed, but we did not know how much, or that everything would be different from what we had thought.
Read MoreGod Ponders the Heart
June 23, 2016
In Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth, the writers frame the story in such a way that the common motivations are nested within, or are born from, a new one: the story opens upon a Scottish heath—damp, cold, and windblown—where the Thane of Glamis (Michael Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard) stand at the graveside of their young…
Read MoreFifty Shores of Grief
June 14, 2016
I write this the evening of June 12, 2016, the day forty-nine people died in the worst mass public shooting in recent US history. A few hours before hundreds of people faced unspeakable terror, my husband and I finished the first season of Justified, a series about Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), a U.S. Marshal who returns…
Read MoreThe Confessions of X: An Interview with Suzanne M. Wolfe, Part 2
January 29, 2016
Continued from yesterday. Read Part 1 here. GW: One of the most interesting aspects of The Confessions of X is the way that X herself responds to Augustine’s intellectual passions, from his Manichean phase to Platonism. She’s not an intellectual but she’s no pushover and she instinctively challenges Augustine… SMW: The last thing I wanted…
Read MoreThe Odyssey: Homer’s Retort to Current U.S. Policy
November 5, 2015
Are you as numb to news of war as I am? We the American public are so used to hearing that our country is acting militarily in yet another place on the globe that we don’t even question whether we should be arming the Saudi Arabian forces in Yemen or “supporting” Syrian so-called moderate rebels.…
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