Friday Links
July 11, 2025
Elk Lake, Waymart, PA
Joshua Hren on Joseph Conrad’s Crooked Cross: Transcending the Tragic Sense of Life
Heaven on Earth by Thomas Traherne
The Whole In One: An Interview with James Matthew Wilson
The Nine Best Movies on the Creative Life
The Architecture of Transformative Experience
Joshua Hren on Joseph Conrad’s Crooked Cross: Transcending the Tragic Sense of Life
Conrad’s stories stir us to wonder how anyone can discern moral meaning “from the jaws of an immoral phenomenon or force or exigency?”[3] His characters contend with hard questions “in pursuit of some viable form of spiritual succor in a universe that makes that higher quest both vulnerable and problematic.”[4]Tilted toward tragic conclusions, his fiction sustains a sense of gravitas, suggesting that “permanent truths” can be best discovered “when the state of the soul is at great risk,” effecting in the reader “moral shock” that awakens us “to both human and universal values that too often tend to be hidden or unheeded.” Chance and accident, fragility and risk permeate Conrad’s fiction. But, says Alexia Hannis, Conrad is no pessimist: he portrays human beings as “neither gods above ‘incertitude,’ nor passive beasts radically determined by it.’”[5] Because free decision remains a viable possibility even amidst a cosmos that is at times chaotic, our pity and our fear are finally determined by the use that characters make of that freedom.
Heaven on Earth by Thomas Traherne
An excerpt from Thomas Traherne in Plough—a reminder to “to appreciate all the ways we’ve been blessed and you’ll be in heaven.”
The Whole In One: An Interview with James Matthew Wilson
This is a fascinating conversation that covers everything from James’s introduction to The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham to the UST MFA. Take a listen.
The Nine Best Movies on the Creative Life
Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker, recommends films about the creative life released since 2000. I’ve been looking for a list like this so I am excited to dive into the ones I haven’t seen.
The Architecture of Transformative Experience
This is “an edited transcript from Cluny Institute’s 2025 METANOIA conference, which brought together speakers from across disciplines to discuss the nature of conversion. The following conversation, The Architecture of Transformative Experience, explores change at its most fundamental levels, through the lenses of theology, history, narrative, and more.”
