Friday Links
July 17, 2026
The Argument between Ajax and Odysseus over Achilles' armour, by Agostino Masucci
What Nolan Missed: Eucatastrophe in Ithaka
Joseph Shaw on The Unfashionable Faith of Ann Widdecombe
Early Arrival by Susan Spear
Tessa Carmen asks Does Christian Fiction Exist?
Theresa Phil reviews No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky
What Nolan Missed: Eucatastrophe in Ithaka
Jason Baxter shares some impressions of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, with promises of a full review to come.
Joseph Shaw on The Unfashionable Faith of Ann Widdecombe
Brutally murdered in her own home, the inimitable Ann Widdecombe might have been the last of a certain type of British woman: unsentimental, courageous, quietly kind.
Widdecombe’s murder has been a tremendous shock to British politics. She was the most prominent British Catholic politician whose faith actually informed her politics—unlike former prime ministers Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, or our presumptive prime minister, Andy Burnham. She converted to Anglicanism in her thirties, and to Catholicism in 1993, and she spent her long political career defending human life and all sorts of causes that she considered just. At the same time, she appeared on numerous television programs and never took herself too seriously. This combination of qualities—a sense of fun, a disinterested commitment to justice, and a powerful supernatural faith—is one that her detractors are completely unable to understand.
Early Arrival by Susan Spear
Last year we laid squares of sod
Down in our bare yard. At first,
Pale, slender spears grew tall and sparse.
Read the rest of this beautiful sonnet in First Things.
Tessa Carmen asks Does Christian Fiction Exist?
In her review of A Theology of Fiction by Cassandra Nelson, Carmen writes:
If Christianity is true, then it seems two things follow. First, our reality is one huge story of redemption; second, any art that we create that has any truth in it will reflect the metaphysics of redemption. So a Christian story, in one sense, would be redundant: we might as well simply say that it is a good story. To say that a story is great is to say that it is true and beautiful, and therefore good stuff indeed. All truth is God’s truth; all good art is God’s art.
Theresa Phil reviews No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky
This is an excellent review of No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky by Fr. Damien Ference from Theresa Phil:
Ference situates O’Connor’s fiction in the context of modernity’s break from incarnated reality. Initiated by French philosopher René Descartes, the focus on cogito (one’s mind or consciousness) created a philosophical rupture between mind and matter that ultimately led to an impoverished understanding of reality. As Ference explains, when modernity alienated the source of all being from the world, and thus relativized God alongside classical ontology, the concrete retreated into the abstract and the intellect became subjugated to the will. Thus, modernity “bred out” (O’Connor’s terms) man’s ability to see what “is” in the concrete reality of day-to-day life. Ference’s aim is to account for how O’Connor’s Catholic-Thomistic worldview, grounded in metaphysics as the “first science” and an epistemology that integrates the senses, reclaims the concrete as integral to a vision of reality as a whole.
