Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union by Richard Carwardine

Cudillero

“The Terrorist, He’s Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Keepers of the Old Ways

Eliot Stein on the people keeping cultural traditions alive

Above the River of Your Longing

Two new prompts

Casa Gorín

“The Purse-Seine” by Robinson Jeffers

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

Birthday Boy

The Art of Losing

The end of the war in Afghanistan shows the danger of our commitment to perpetual optimism

“Farewell” by Agha Shahid Ali

Poems read aloud, beautifully

The Capital of Self-Reliance

How a backwater became a philosophical powerhouse

The Transcendentalists and Their Worldby Robert A. Gross

Spinning a Good Yarn

Once upon a time, Clara Parkes adopted a 676-pound bale of wool and got an inside look at a disappearing industry

The Bird That Sang I Am

Poems about the place where we belong

Los Dedos

“Failing and Flying” by Jack Gilbert

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Touché-ing the Void

How can we live only to die?

The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaningby Paul Bloom

Heather Kirtland

Grounded Vessels

Mad Dogs and Transcendentalists

How the individualism of Emerson and Thoreau differs from today’s libertarianism

● NEWSLETTER

Please enter a valid email address
That address is already in use
The security code entered was incorrect
Thanks for signing up