Sin is a perennial reality that we cannot eradicate through political will. Instead, we are called to heal the world. One of the best dramatic considerations of this is Shakespeare’s hilarious, beautiful, and criminally overlooked play, Measure for Measure.

It is sad that we as a culture have become so desensitized that we do not even blink an eye at the relatively ‘tame’ nudity of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.

Are comics, as some Francophones argue, a distinct ‘9th art’? In the first of a monthly series, Felix James Miller argues they are and introduces readers to some of the delights of the art form.

Dante’s La Vita Nuova is indisputably the work of a young man, a man whose passions (and poetic compositions) are still discovering the place they ought to have in the world. Thankfully, though, Dante’s ‘immature’ juvenilia is far greater and more penetrating a work than most poets can ever compose in the entire course of their lives.

Alain de Botton’s book tells us that we can and should regain hope about the future of our homes and cities. Architecture has been in a sad state in the West for many decades, but there are also glimmers of promise.

Sir Gawain is a dramatic tale of a knight’s bravery and chastity in the face of temptation and, crucially, the distinctive experience of grace and forgiveness that Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection has made possible.

“We don’t need any more evil in the world. We need a lot more reckoning with it.”

When we find ourselves at an impasse, it can be very helpful to look to great figures from history for guidance. Today, we could learn a thing or two about cultivating political culture from a universally-known but rarely studied figure, Charles the Great, or Charlemagne.

Waugh’s trilogy approaches war with a transcendent hope that is capable of withstanding the slings and arrows of modernity without losing itself.

Reading Sigrid Undset’s trilogy challenges readers to confront their own moral vacillations and need for constancy.

Lewis wants his readers to re-examine our presumptions about everything from modern education and science to ‘the West’ and contraception. Recognizing this can help us understand why the novel has so divided readers.

Whereas much science fiction simply sidesteps the theological questions a Christian would raise on discovering rational life on other planets, C.S. Lewis asks us to wrestle with them.