Friday Links
August 23, 2024
Winners of the First Things Poetry Prize
Inaugural Issue of New Verse Review
No Stage Catholics: Robert Wyllie
Shroud of Turin dates from time of Christ
Zena Hitz: What Is Time For?
Winners of the First Things Poetry Prize
Congratulations to the winners of the inaugural First Things Poetry Prize: first prize winner Josiah A. R. Cox and second place winer Ryan Wilson. The poems will be published in First Things in October.
Inaugural Issue of New Verse Review
The first issue of New Verse Review is truly wonderful. There are poems from Sally Thomas and Matthew E. Henry and Christopher Honey, Ben Myers and Elijah Blumov and Amit Majmuder, Matthew Buckley Smith, James Matthew Wilson, Katie Hartsock, and many more. Please do take a look at all of the fantastic poetry and criticism in this issue and, if you can, support the work Steven and his Advisory board are doing.
No Stage Catholics: Robert Wyllie
Wyllie considers what drew Willa Cather to Catholicism:
She never entered the Church. Many readers thought she must have. In his survey of twentieth-century American literature, published in 1937, Vernon Loggins mistakenly asserts that Cather converted to Catholicism. A student at Mount Saint Mary’s named John Walsh, inspired to write his undergraduate thesis for this reason, found it “incredible” that one should revere Rome as a “great organization” and “spiritual power” and not enter into communion with Catholics. His letters further annoyed Cather. She wrote the head of his English department in a fit of pique. “I am an Episcopalian because my mother and father were,” she insists perfunctorily, “and that Church is home to me.” Déjà entendu—my father has said almost the same to me.
Shroud of Turin dates from time of Christ
Italian researchers have used a new X-ray technique to demonstrate that the Shroud of Turin dates from the time of Jesus Christ.
Scientists at the Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR) studied eight tiny samples of fabric from the shroud, a burial garment which bears the imprint of a man killed by crucifixion, using a method called wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS).
They were able to age flax cellulose – long chains of sugar molecules which slowly deteriorate over time – to show that the shroud is 2,000 years old, based on the conditions it was kept in.
Zena Hitz: What Is Time For?
Zena Hitz considers our busyness (which seems almost cult-like to me—the cult of busy—or an addiction) and not just what we might do if we weren’t so busy, but, more importantly, how we might live:
What is leisure, and why is it necessary for human beings? The leisure that I am interested in is not the first thing you may imagine: bingeing Netflix on the couch, lounging at the beach, attending a festive party with friends, or launching yourself from the largest human catapult for the thrill of it. The leisure that is necessary for human beings is not just a break from real life, a place where we rest and restore ourselves in order to go back to work. What we are after is a state that looks like the culmination of a life.
