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

Telling the Truth about Immigration

Berwyn, PA.  Nobody wants to.  Most politicians would rather appeal to platitudes about America as a "nation of immigrants" than confront their responsibility to...

The Pythagorean Temptation

Berwyn, PA.  In his Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain argues that one central fault of the modern mind has been its propensity to think of...

From the Trinity Capital

Beyond the purple velvet drapes, the skeins of billowed gossamer, my hotel window looks down on the back gates of Trinity College. Up three floors and pierced by a late October sun, the room has been done up like a swinger’s pad, with leopard print and leather, with mirrors and conic shaded lights in orbit about the dark mass of the pillowed bed.

Our Slippery Slope into the Age of “Big Love”

Berwyn, PA.  Many of us will recall the criticism Rick Santorum endured regarding this passage from a 2003 interview: And if the Supreme Court says...

Mark Mitchell at Villanova

Berwyn, PA.  Mark Mitchell, FPR's founding father and Editor-in-Chief, will deliver a lecture at Villanova University next week.  The event is open to the...

Abstraction Rightly Understood

Part III in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church.  Read Part I, and Part II. Berwyn, PA.  In the last installment of this...

Fleeing the Fearful Loneliness of Thought: Our Post-rational Age

Berwyn, PA.  In the first weeks of FPR, when we authors dared commit to writing one essay a week, as if we could all...

Republicans and the Language of Citizenship

Berwyn, PA.  I add my voice to the FPR symposium on the presidential election in this morning's edition of Crisis Magazine, where I assess...

True Politics in the Wake of Obama

Berwyn, PA.  I woke this morning, prepared to write a point-by-point assessment of yesterday's election, though I was not looking forward to the job, since...

The Wrong Side of History

Berwyn, PA.  Cardinal George offers us the strong words -- not of oracular prophecy, but of historical wisdom.  A few passages: Communism imposed a total way...

Against Rationalism, Idealism, and Abstraction

Part II in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church.  Read Part I here. Where the traditionalist position I have sketched appears weakest is...

The Problem of Place

Part I in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church. Devon, PA.  Several times during the last couple years, the FPR comment boxes have received...