James Matthew Wilson
James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University.
Articles by James Matthew Wilson
Contracepting Cultural Memory
R.J. Snell writes, "Contraception is already so normalized in our society that its use is presumed for both married and unmarried alike; in fact, so normalized is contraception that its…
A Tenancy of Will
Your body’s yours, just as this poem is mine: to make, destroy—a tenancy of will, for every citizen and concubine.
Personality, Conversion, and Being: On John Paul II’s “Fides et Ratio”
The Reader Objects!: If God is Personal and Loving above all, if the Christian believes reason is fundamentally preceded by what is revealed in Faith, then what grounds has the…
Gratuitous Foundations: Benedict XVI’s Humanism of the Gift, Part II
Benedict's encyclical responds to the elite technocrats of the liberal order more charitably than they deserve. It is true that, in mundane circumstances, liberal society often professes a congenial relativism,…
Gratuitous Foundations: Benedict XVI’s Humanism of the Gift, Part I
Benedict XVI's first social encyclical, "Caritas in Veritate," challenges long-accepted understandings of the relation of faith and reason and of charity and justice. In so doing, he not only calls…
Beating Back the Alien Dark
In 2007, we bought a house and moved to Greenville, North Carolina. Here, I recall the first rough day of home ownership, topped off by John Wayne and cold wine.
The Culture of Atomic Eros and the Hatred of the Church
It is time to consider what the latest uproar against Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church tells us about the state of our society. It is an ugly truth:…
My First Book Published At Last
"Four Verse Letters" has just appeared from the Franciscan University at Steubenville Press.
Hot Tub Economics
The ideology of free trade and managed society continues to destroy the prospects of a prosperous American in the Twenty-First Century. Let us dig down and return to the one…
Milliner on Wilson, Wilson on Gioia: Catholic Intellectuals and Modern Culture
Matthew J. Milliner explicates "Art and Beauty," while Dana Gioia wins Notre Dame's Laetare Medal
The End of Beauty — And We’re Not Talking Teleologically Here!
The concluding installment of "Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic" has appeared on First Principles, a series of essays begun in hopes of analyzing and reforming American conservatism as…
T.S. Eliot on Community and Belief
I shall be giving a lecture on Eliot and Stoicism next week; FPR readers are invited.