Friday Links
St. Isidore the Farmer, Joaquin Castañon
May 15, 2026
From Fame to Faith Through a Broken Statue | Kevin Matthews
Matthew Schmitz on Our Strange Catholic Moment
William H. Pritchard: A Lifetime Enterprise, The last essays of Helen Vendler
Henry Oliver on Jonathan Swift’s Frustrated Humor
Jason Reid on Juster’s Petrarch
POETICS Podcast: Episode Scattered Rhymes: A.M. Juster's Canzoniere and the Art of Falling in Love Again
From Fame to Faith Through a Broken Statue | Kevin Matthews
The Benedictine Dialogues in conversation with Kevin Matthews, a Chicago radio legend, to talk about:
how he discovered redemption in a discarded statue of Mary. He now travels internationally spreading Marian devotion to the broken. Matthews’ story is told in the documentary feature, Broken Mary. His travels have brought him all the way to the Vatican and his meeting with the pope has influenced the approval of a new title for the Blessed Mother, “Our Lady of the Broken.”
Matthew Schmitz on Our Strange Catholic Moment
When the Catholic Church was at its institutional peak in mid-century, it had a far smaller role in shaping public debates than Protestantism did. At that point, the Protestant tradition had prominent mainline spokesmen, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, and powerful voices in the black church, such as Martin Luther King Jr. America still has more Protestants than Catholics—roughly twice as many, in fact—but Protestantism presently seems less central to America’s “religiously informed public philosophy” than Catholicism does.
William H. Pritchard: A Lifetime Enterprise, The last essays of Helen Vendler
The essays in Inhabit the Poem are divided between poets old and new, or newish: from John Donne and William Blake to twentieth-century poets such as W. B. Yeats and Sylvia Plath. Apart from Ocean Vuong, no living poets were included. Each poet is represented by a single poem, followed by an essay about it; each essay originally appeared in the journal Liberties, edited by Leon Wieseltier. That they now appear together under the Library of America imprint suggests the esteem Vendler’s name brings with it and the conviction that, even as the reading and teaching of poetry grows more marginal to academia and culture at large, her contribution to that activity deserves to be memorialized. She never behaved as if getting a poem “right” were less than supremely important—no easy task even for serious readers. She once wrote of the “scientific” aspect of her discipline, defining it, rather formidably, as the effort to engage with “the logic of sequential and evidential exposition” to be discovered in good poems. Education in reading and criticizing poetry was above all else “training in subtlety of response,” a training that was arduous as well as more than occasionally rewarding. Those familiar with the critic I. A. Richards will recognize Vendler’s debt to him, one she gratefully acknowledges.
Henry Oliver on Jonathan Swift’s Frustrated Humor
The great pleasure of reading Swift is that his plainness is by no means simple. As the quotation chosen by that stack boy shows (taken from the 1720 pamphlet AProposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture), Swift was vicious in a good cause. He loved to let a sentence or paragraph unspool, like a fly making concentric circles above its landing place, before whipping down at the end with a snap.
Jason Reid on Juster’s Petrarch
A.M. Juster has released a new translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, or Songbook, a collection of 366 lyric poems – most of them sonnets. In contrast to previous translations, Juster is committed to the same rhyme schemes and meters that Petrarch used, faithfully reproducing the form which Petrarch mastered and which shaped the poets of England’s literary golden age. Juster does not always provide a word-for-word translation; instead, he focuses on the sentence level. His goal, above all, is to capture the musicality of Petrarch, to make the words on the page sing from our lips.
POETICS Podcast: Episode Scattered Rhymes: A.M. Juster's Canzoniere and the Art of Falling in Love Again
I found this podcast more helpful than the above article, for what that’s worth:
Six hundred and fifty years after his death, Petrarch is still teaching us how to navigate a hostile sea. In this rain-paired episode, Tamarah opens A.M. Juster's new translation of the Canzoniere, out this April from Liveright with an introduction by Andrew Frisardi, and finds herself unexpectedly in love with the man who invented the European love sonnet. Three things about the poems. Three surprising ways the form holds them. Three biographical facts that change every line. From Laura's name dispersed into the breeze, to the Babylon sonnets banned for two centuries, to the storm-tossed vessel of poem 189, this is a conversation about why love poetry isn't dead, and how Petrarch shows us the way home.
