Friday Links
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The Magi Journeying by James Tissot
A Demonology of the Internet with Dr. Thomas Harmon
A Southern Man
With Good Reason
Faith-filled Books for Under the Tree
Modern romance could use a little Jane Austen
Studies in Unmeaning: On Thomas Pynchon’s Detective Fictions
While All the Earth in Darkness Sleeps
A Demonology of the Internet with Dr. Thomas Harmon
Why is understanding technology and its influence so important? Today, Dr. Michael Dauphinais meets with Dr. Thomas Harmon, professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas and the founding director of a new MA in evangelization and culture with the Word on Fire Institute, to discuss Dr. Harmon’s unreleased book, A Demonology of the Internet, which is an exploration of how online figures’ influence of viewers can resemble demonic manipulation
A Southern Man
Brian Kennedy from Lydwine interviews Glenn Arbery:
“History exists,” the novelist Glenn Arbery once remarked, “to be turned into poetry.” When he said it, he wasn’t encouraging mere sentiment — he’s not the sort of writer enamored with the comfort of small epiphanies. For Arbery, poetry is the realm “where the gods could feel their holy space again, where the angel could stand in the threshold.” Where epiphanies occur in his work, the land lies scorched and bare, ready for new beginnings.
With Good Reason
Steven Knepper talks about daily farmer and poetry, including a recitation of “Breech,” one of my favorite Steve Knepper poems. The whole conversation is rich and delightful.
Faith-filled Books for Under the Tree
Shemaiah Gonzalez gives a wonderful list of books for Christmas gifts.
Modern romance could use a little Jane Austen
Austen’s novels present a world of rigid social etiquette and constraining courtship rituals that seem about as far from the modern dating scene as it’s possible to get. But maybe that’s the answer. Perhaps there’s something in an Austen romance that is actually more desirable than the dating apps and casual hookups of today.
Studies in Unmeaning: On Thomas Pynchon’s Detective Fictions
Irish writer Adrian McKinty reads Pynchon’s hardboiled trilogy:
Taken together, the three books form a trilogy of epistemological uncertainty. Each marks a different phase in the history of information: the analog haze of the 1960s, the digital pre-9/11 netherworld, the proto-industrial conspiracies of the 1930s. And across them, the detective—once Modernism’s heroic empiricist—a figure of melancholy drift, a leftover from a world that still believed in beginnings and ends. These books can be read as comedies of cognitive dissonance or as melancholy elegies for the very possibility of closure.
While All the Earth in Darkness Sleeps
Cappella Musica of Saint Andrew Catholic Church, Old Pasadena, California, at the 2025 Very Marian Advent Prayer Service perform, “The Promise Fulfilled: New Marian Carols for Advent and Christmas,” November 7, 2025. Steven Ottományi is the director, and the text is from James Matthew Wilson. Glorious!
