Friday Links
October 17, 2025
The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier by Peter Paul Rubens
A.E. Stallings, Luke Stromberg, and Nicholas Friedman at Head House Books
New Verse Review Halloween Party
Titus Techera on Why Novels Used To Matter, And Still Can
Concerning the Death of Catholic Fiction: An Author’s Perspective
Thomist Poets with John Morris
Can the Humanities Be Saved?
A.E. Stallings, Luke Stromberg, and Nicholas Friedman at Head House Books
Ernie Hilbert hosted A. E. Stallings, Luke Stromberg, and Nicholas Friedman at the wonderful Head House Books in Philly. It was a great night of poetry and, in case you missed it, you can listen to (for now) two of the poets read their work: Luke Stromberg and A. E. Stallings.
New Verse Review Halloween Party
There’s still time (unless you are reading this after 8pm EST on Friday) to join the New Verse Review Halloween Party. Sadly, I will miss it, but you should go. There Halloween Mini-Issue is also available now HERE.
Titus Techera on Why Novels Used To Matter, And Still Can
Really interesting review of Christopher Scalia’s 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read):
Scalia abandons academic authority, if there is any left, and instead speaks as a man of taste and experience to his younger friends. He wants us to look to the English novel going back to the mid-18th century to find ourselves, to raise questions of morality and politics that major writers persuaded broad audiences to raise, and thus to inquire how to live our lives. To recapitulate that past is somehow to acknowledge our current tumult, and thus to demand the right to step back from making decisions before we are prepared.
Concerning the Death of Catholic Fiction: An Author’s Perspective
Catholic writers and publishers must not simply adapt to the digital world. They must reclaim fiction as a medium that can carry the larger public imagination into the future. Art is only art because it is an expression of truth. As such, our digital presence must point toward greater richness of art itself. For, if the medium imparts messages of its own, then abandoning fiction is not a neutral choice—it is the quiet surrender of one of our richest instruments of evangelization and culture-making.
And Catholic audiences must support writers and the presses and journals that bring their books into being by reading and buying those books! If you want to change the culture for the better, you have to, you know, actually support good culture.
Thomist Poets with John Morris
Follow the link to register for Sunday night’s edition of the always excellent Thomist Poets Reading Series.
Can the Humanities Be Saved?
A conversation with Jennifer Frey and Anastasia Berg
There is a sea change in higher education in the nineteenth century. To make a long and complicated story short, the federal government gets involved with land-grant universities. But the more fundamental change is that we decided that we needed to be like the Germans, taking the German research university as a model. And from there things start to switch: the lecture becomes the primary modality of learning—so you sit quietly and listen to your professor profess about specialized disciplinary knowledge. Knowledge becomes the thing that the university is about, rather than character formation, which had been the goal of liberal education. Around the same time, knowledge gets balkanized into specialized departments while general education becomes mostly elective. This started with Harvard——and everybody wants to be like Harvard, so it just kind of proliferated from there. The idea was that the students’ passions and interests should be determinative, and you just study what you want, whatever floats your boat.
