James Matthew Wilson

James Matthew Wilson
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James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from art, ethics, and politics, to meter and poetic form, from the importance of local culture to the nature of truth, goodness, and beauty. Wilson is also a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, and The American Conservative. He has published five books, including most recently, a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). Raised in the Great Lakes State, baptised in the parish of St. Thomas Aquinas, seasoned by summers on Lake Wawasee (Indiana), and educated under the Golden Dome, Wilson is scion of a family of Hoosiers dating back to the early nineteenth century, and an offspring of Southside Chicago Poles whose tavern kept the city wet through the Depression (and prohibition) years.  He now lives under the same sentence of reluctant exile as many another native son of the Midwest, but has dug himself in for good on the margins of the Main Line in Pennsylvania with his beautiful wife, dangerous daughter, and saintly sons. For information on Wilson's scholarship and a selection of his published work, click here. See books written and recommended by James Matthew Wilson.

Recent Essays

The Need for Autarchy

Devon, PA.  Thanks in part to the series of fine essays John Médaille has provided us during the last several weeks, the implicit economic...

This is My Son

Devon, PA.  This is my son.  As you see him here, he has been alive for just about one-hundred-forty days and has, this and...

James Kalb for Mayor

Devon, PA.  When given the opportunity, I have made no secret of my great admiration for James Kalb's The Tyranny of Liberalism.  Readers of...

The Speech of Work and the Work of Speech

Devon, PA.  Outside of certain, very particular, Christian circles, one seldom hears much about man's fallen nature anymore; and yet, as G.K. Chesterton once...

Letter from a Traditional Conservative

Devon, PA.  Upon reading an essay of Patrick Deneen's, a close and dear relative recently wrote me, protesting the uselessness of the terms "liberal" and "conservative." ...

Feed Fish to the Leviathan

Devon, PA.  Stanley Fish has taken up a lot of public space during his career, but never has he darkened the depths in such...

Sex, Eschatology, and Everyday Life

Devon, PA.  I have contended that the two most vocal sources of outrage at Pope Benedict XVI's remark about the deleterious role of condoms...

Sex, Technocrats, and Technobrats

Devon, PA.  During the last few weeks, Patrick Deneen's posts on Front Porch Republic have drawn our attention to the near identity of the...

Reasoning about Stories

  Devon, PA. Here is something for you that no one will dispute: all complaints about modernity, including those that fit under the rubric of...

Where is Our Perpetual Peace?

Devon, PA.  At the root of American and, indeed, western public life rests a fundamental assumption: the specific is dangerous, the particular a menace,...

Mr. Herbert’s Sunday Morning Service

Devon, PA.  Most people, agrarian or otherwise, do not read poetry anymore.  Ours is not merely a forgetful culture, but one that has long...

An Elegy for South Bend

  Devon, PA.  Some years ago, early in my graduate student days in South Bend, I was invited to begin an opinion column in the...