All work stops at The Washington Post when everyone feels the whole building lurch and groan. The press is running. Steven Spielberg’s The Post recounts the story of The Washington Post, at that point a small, family owned newspaper, crashing onto the public scene as the editors attempt to publish classified White House documents on the Vietnam War. The paper owner, Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep), … Continue reading The Post
This past July on a warm summer afternoon, I attended a family friends’ poetry night—a classy little shindig with hors d’oeuvres, heels, sophisticated people, and, of course, poetry. A few months later, one of these poems unexpectedly resurfaced in a conversation with a friend. It was a poem entitled “A Fair World Tho’ a Fallen” by Christina Georgina Rossetti: You tell me that the world … Continue reading The World Is Fair, in Spite of the Old Fall
This is the cold time, the long time, the Lenten time. All of creation groans for new life, but the ground whispers, Not yet. All of God’s people groan for the final redemption, for the here-and-now of God-with-us, but the still, small voice whispers, Not yet. The Resurrection is coming. The Resurrection has come. From an eternal perspective, the Resurrection is. Christ cried, “Finished,” as … Continue reading In My End is My Beginning: On the Mercy of Time in the Season of Lent
When an employee at Bordeaux University was told to rearrange the morbid artifacts of an out-of-the-way store closet full of shattered skulls, guns, hangman’s ropes, and aborted fetuses of siamese twins in 2009, he moved a few jars to find, on the back of the shelf, a tall, sealed beaker covered with decades of dust. It contained the lost amputated right leg of the great … Continue reading Leg in a Jar: The Amputation of the World’s Greatest Actress
He meets your eye from the book’s broad flyleaf, a vivid figure on a ground of flame blue. Piercing through a quizzical squint and the flash-fixed vapor of a cheeky cigar, the gaze is more forward than one expects from such age. Facing the title page’s monoglyph—Design—the portrait reads like a dare. In a way, it is. A household name in his native UK, Terence … Continue reading The Unlikely Peripatetic, or, A Postscript to the Paperclip
Lemons. There are, on occasion, in a small glass bowl to the left side of the iced tea, lemons in our college cafeteria. That. That, my friend, is how you can tell that there are donors, or parents, or prospective students in town. The details, the small things—they really do count. Who knows, lemons really could be what convinces an all-state athlete, with a 4.0 … Continue reading Short Story Contest Winner—"Lemons", by Ian Atherton
Junior Ian Atherton is an English major and Vice President of Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity, where he oversees the house’s internal affairs. He took a break from schoolwork and intramural sports to sit down with The Forum to discuss his winning short story, “Lemons”. F What’s your normal writing process? Do you have one? Lemons was a funny one—I needed to submit a writing sample … Continue reading Interview with the Author
Hillsdale Forum 