Friday Links
March 202, 2026
St. Cuthbert
The Poet’s Vision: Ryan Wilson on Poetic Hospitality
Thomas Gainsborough’s Portraits of Pride and Prejudice
Alasdair MacIntyre Reads Jane Austen Reading Her Late Modern Reader
Family lore from the Ireland of yore
George Scialabba on The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch
The Poet’s Vision: Ryan Wilson on Poetic Hospitality
If you read one essay this weekend, let it be this one.
“The poetry of earth is never dead.” So writes John Keats in his 1816 sonnet, “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket.” Recalling the dual meanings of the Greek kosmos, Robert Penn Warren tells us, “Beauty is another name for the world.” Indeed, the Beauty of God’s Creation is always calling to us. While the study of theology, especially theology in the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, beloved of both Aquinas and Dante, helps us to understand that Beauty is a transcendental attribute of God, who, as the actus purus, is the ground of all Being, it is the poet’s task to help us see this Beauty in Creation all around us, to help us love the Beauty of Creation in such a way as to point us toward its source in God. The poet’s task is to make something beautiful, to reveal, in Baudelaire’s words, “the presence of the infinite in the finite.”
Thomas Gainsborough’s Portraits of Pride and Prejudice
If you’re in NYC, make a visit to the Frick Collection (1 East 70th Street) to see this collection. The tour will be there through May 25, 2026.
Alasdair MacIntyre Reads Jane Austen Reading Her Late Modern Reader
Austen’s view of virtue is teleological rather than utilitarian. It is not that being virtuous will provide her characters with wealth, power, or success. In fact, for Fanny Price, constancy in virtue threatens to deprive her of these external goods. However, for Austen, acting virtuously is ordered toward the telos (goal) of the genuinely human person. Her novels also highlight genuine virtue as being born from internal goodness and she contrasts this with the mere appearance of goodness demonstrated by adherence to the conventions of polite society or charm that can add a deceptive veneer over vice. Modern misinterpretations of her characters and themes are often the result of an inability to comprehend Austen’s Aristotelian moral philosophy.
Family lore from the Ireland of yore
It’s fascinating how quickly history starts to move—especially in remote areas like County Donegal—after inching along at glacial speed for hundreds of years. Here I am, a writer who has lived to see the advent of Star Trek–type smartphones, ChatGPT, and self-driving cars, with a father whose boyhood passed in medieval conditions very similar to those of his great-great-great-grandfather. Indeed, the world he grew up in was utterly different from ours today. The sense of radical disjunction is hard to think about, even harder to describe. But a colleague recently asked me to tell his students about the Ireland of my parents’ youth, and I felt strangely privileged to speak about their world, whose last vestiges I observed decades ago as a boy: the vanished world of rural Ireland.
George Scialabba on The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch
“Moral beauty” is an arresting phrase. Typically, goodness is commended for its effects rather than for its aspect. Perhaps the scarcity nowadays of such lofty sacred eloquence as Edwards’s, the drabness of much preaching and religious writing compared with earlier periods, when sermons were literary performances and widely published, is part of the general verbal aridity of our age, brought on by the ubiquitous toxic blooms of commercial speech that convert our innermost thoughts into advertising jingles. This is by no means only a loss for believers; the religious imagination is a vital part of a living culture. Ceding it – like so much of contemporary culture – to formula and cliché gradually but inexorably hollows us out.
