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

Caritas in the Veritable Welfare State

We need not rely with some desperation on the Hope that is a gift, if we can gin up optimism of our own sort.

Local Bookstores and the Writers Who Love Them

Devon, PA. My old friend and classmate, Jeremiah Chamberlin, writes in to the FPR ombudsman of a new venture he has undertaken to help...

Beauty and Other Transcendentals

Devon, PA.  The penultimate installment of "Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic" has now appeared at First Principles.  In Part V, I had...

Jacques Maritain on Art and Work

Devon, PA.  In the early pages of Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism, he provides a philosophy of art that restores "art," in the sense...

Their Time Up at State College

East Lansing, MI.  Back home in the steady snows of Michigan, I came across an old poem of mine, the other day, that seems...

Foreign Policy and the Gift of the World

Devon, PA.  In February 2007, as the Iraq war crept to the end of its fourth year, I published this short essay, proposing a...

FPR at Notre Dame this Weekend

Devon, PA.  I'm pleased to announce that FPR will be holding a panel discussion at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture's Annual...

Bourgeois Beauty and Bourgeois Relativism

Devon, PA.  For those FPR readers interested in keeping up with my ongoing series, Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic, the third and...

Conservatism as Literary Movement

Devon, PA.  Last month, I alerted FPR readers to the appearance of the first part of my essay, "Art and Beauty against the Politicized...

Eric Miller on The Lost Cause of the Midwest

Devon, PA.  If you have not encountered Eric Miller's savage indignation elsewhere, here is a fine place to start: his review of David S....

This Age of Christian Martyrs

Devon, PA. Everyone knows the "secularization hypothesis" of the West; the only difference between one person and another is whether one also knows that...

A Prayer for Livia Grace

Devon, PA.  This week marks my daughter's third birthday.  As a way of tossing a little Front Porch confetti her way, I reprint here ...