A Real Hazard, I Mean

“I know enough Anglo-Saxon to be a hazard, but not enough to set up shop as a translator of anything so important as Beowulf. I know the words attercop, which means spider, and rimcraft, which means arithmetic, and merscmealuwe, which means marshmallow. But unfortunately, none of those words comes up in Beowulf really, and so there I am, just sitting there.”

Beowulf, p. 1

All We Got Were These Queequeg Piercings

There is an old joke that has an evangelical say something like this to a liberal—“I’ll call you a Christian if you call me a scholar.” But whenever conservative believers enter into the world of such trade-offs, the end result is always something like Simple Simon going to the fair. They come home, if they …

Jane Austen and Our Culture of Feeeeelings

As I noted in my brief review of Pride and Prejudice below, Jane Austen is amazing. A truly wise woman, she wrote a novel of two kinds of people — people who change and grow, and people who do not. This is simply another way of marking those who are capable of repentance and those …

The 7 Real Reasons Protestants Can’t Write

Peter Leithart recently set the cat among the pigeons by claiming here and here that Protestants can’t write. He did this as a Protestant, writing, so we really should be dubious from the outset. Among the scholarly responses to this flight of learned fancy, I commend to you Derek Rishmawy and Steven Wedgeworth. But I …

The Blinkered Prophetess

Like many conservatives, I have been able to enjoy the writing of Marilynne Robinson, even though she appears to be quite at home in the liberal mainline tradition. Despite the differences I have had with her outlook on many issues, her novels have been written with depth, nuance, and sensitivity. This is apparently because she …