January 24, 2016
Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Death of God
The connection hinges on the meanings of the word mystery, but it’s worth considering. Creation, after all, is the scene of the greatest whodunit of all time—theoretical physicists and speculative metaphysicians […]
November 4, 2015
The Principle of Inversion
If you look from a distance at our media talking about traditional religions, you find that “Hinduism” is reduced to the caste system and Hindu nationalism, “Islam” to fundamentalist or […]
October 29, 2015
Hard and Brittle Religions
Why do some religions die out, while others persist in the face of brutal persecution? Religious diversity, while not completely analogous to biological diversity, has drastically diminished over the […]
October 25, 2015
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Irrelevance
With the American government sending drones overseas, with our military involved over the past decade in conflict after dirty conflict; with the largest incarcerated population in the world, and […]
October 14, 2015
Elitism and American Poetry
The question of “the audience of poetry” is one that vexes poets and critics endlessly in our country. There are, on this as on so many other issues, two camps, […]
September 10, 2015
By Any Other Name: The Best American Pseudonym 2015
Not too long ago, a writer wrote a children’s fantasy book. It was rejected quite a few times, but eventually a publisher took interest. The writer’s name was Joanne, and […]
July 30, 2015
The Invented Antagonism
The hallmark of a 19th or 20th century (or 21st century) debate about religion is a focus on origins. This began with Darwin’s The Origin of Species, in relation to […]
July 15, 2015
Old News: The Consequences of our Cultural Obsession with Newness
There’s nothing new about our love of newness. “Men love that song which is newest on their ears”—that’s Homer, writing as early as Europe’s second epic poem. The problem […]
June 29, 2015
Neustadt Prize Nomination: Don Paterson
This year I’ve had the honor of joining the jury for the Neustadt International Prize in Literature, called by some the “American Nobel.” As a juror, I was given the […]
June 10, 2015
Top 5 Reasons Oxford Graduates Should Vote for A. E. Stallings
This June, Oxford graduates around the world will be voting, in person and online, for the Oxford Professor of Poetry. It’s a big enough deal that Ladbrokes is charting […]
May 30, 2015
Poetry and Chess
I was perusing YouTube for new movie trailers, as I do sometimes in between cases at work. Confession: I never intend to go watch the flick unless it’s a new […]
May 7, 2015
How the West Inverted its Literary Values
In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and […]