Shifting to Wordpress Site

Though I haven't blogged regularly here in several years, I have used it to keep followers updated whenever I publish new writing. Though this site will not go away, I will no longer post updates here. If you'd still like to receive notifications of my writing, please follow me at my current site. I have two pieces coming out in the near future and will continue to post all updates there. Thanks to you who have remained loyal followers here!

Article at Veritas Journal

I have a new article up at the journal Veritas, on Mark Twain and temptation of ideology in the classical-school movement. Veritas is published by Trinity Schools, a network of Christian classical schools. Thanks to editor Abbey Von Gohren for publishing the article! The journal looks to publish a wide array of pieces--please do check them out.

Piece on Education and Florida's Schools in The Bulwark

Recently, The Bulwark published my article on what changes to the Florida educational system might look like from the perspective of the classroom. Given an accusatory headline and accompanied by picture of a scowling Ron DeSantis, the article appears more political than I had envisioned it, but I hope that those who read will find the piece to be more nuanced. Really, I aimed to use the news cycle to write about something more timeless--what education is and isn't. Thanks for reading!

Article on Teaching in Providence College Magazine

Though a number of things have kept me away from writing much recently, I did have an article published recently in my alma mater's alumni magazine. It is half an homage to some of my best college teachers, half a reflection on the art of teaching. I hope to return to some more regular writing in the near future! The article can be found here: https://news.providence.edu/in-a-class-on-spiritual-crisis-i-found-my-vocation-as-a-teacher/

Review of Jonathan Malesic's The End of Burnout at The Bulwark

My review of Jonathan Malesic's new book on burnout is up at The Bulwark. I came to follow Malesic's work after reading him in places like Commonweal and The Hedgehog Review, and have really enjoyed reading him. His new book, out last month from University of California Press, should be commended for, among other things, bringing the Catholic intellectual tradition to bear on our contemporary work-life balance. Please check it out!

New Site

I have a new personal website that will now serve as a home base of sorts for me.

www.mikestthomas.com

I haven't written much in recent months (school has kept me occupied) but I do currently have one book I'm reviewing, The End of Burnout by Jon Malesic, a writer whose essays on work and monasticism I have enjoyed reading in recent years. 

I will continue to post new pieces here as I publish them. Thanks for reading!

Review of Randy Boyagoda's Dante's Indiana at Plough

My review of Randy Boyagoda’s latest novel, Dante’s Indiana, has been published online at Plough. The book is the second in a planned trilogy—the first book, Original Prin, I reviewed at The American Interest a few years back. I can’t recommend Boyagoda’s fiction highly enough, especially for those interested in the “Catholic novel.” Do check them out!

Review of Michael Farris Smith's Nick

The July 2021 issue of America Magazine contains my review of Michael Farris Smith’s latest novel, Nick. The novel imagines a backstory for Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Though Smith’s Nick bears little outward resemblance to Fitzgerald’s narrator, I argue, in my review, that both Nicks are cut from the same Catholic mold—they straddle the worlds of hope and despair, and are drawn toward, as Fitzgerald puts it, “the secret griefs of wild, unknown, men.”

Nowadays much ado is made in Catholic literary circles about what constitutes “Catholic fiction” and which writers we might consider to be “Catholic novelists.” Nick Ripatrazone has done some of the best writing on this topic (I reviewed his Longing for an Absent God in America last year). Still, this approach has its limitations, and at times the need to claim certain writers and works for the Catholic faith can seem territorial, and even arbitrary. Is it the subject matter of a novel that makes it Catholic? Or the style? Or the literary imagination that it manifests? Or does the author’s own biography determine whether we can call him or her a “Catholic” writer? As Catholicism diminishes as a distinct and separate culture, are contemporary Catholics overzealous in tagging anything that bears a trace of the faith as a “Catholic” work of art? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I think they are important to think about if we are going to establish some coherence in talking about the relationship of faith to literature.

Regardless of the pitfalls of talking about Catholic writers, I am surprised that F. Scott Fitzgerald is so infrequently mentioned as one. I have written at some length about Fitzgerald’s Catholicism, both in print for Commonweal (here and here) and on this blog. Fitzgerald was raised and educated Catholic, groomed by his literary mentors to be the next great “Catholic novelist” in the manner of Robert Hugh Benson. Fitzgerald even considered the priesthood for a while. Though he fell away from the Church as an adult, he was never completely separated from it, as I mention in the review. Significantly, I would argue, his fictional characters, caught as they are between flesh and spirit, hope and despair, are evidence of the indelible mark Catholicism left on him. From Amory Blaine of This Side of Paradise to the title character of The Great Gatsby to Dick Diver of Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald’s protagonists, like the author himself, were mired in the desires of the flesh but not completely given over to them. Something in them (regret? hope?) pulled them back from their debauchery even as they committed it. It is this “double vision,” I argue in my review of Nick, that is essentially Catholic, because it allows for the possibility of conversion of heart. So long as one possesses this double nature, one has the ability to be “in the world but not of it,” as the saying goes, to live out the demands of an Incarnational faith.

For those interested in reading more about Fitzgerald’s Catholicism, I would highly recommend Joan M. Allen’s Candles and Carnival Lights.

Review of Grace Olmstead's Uprooted

My review of Grace Olmstead's memoir Uprooted has been published by The Bulwark. Olmstead writes knowingly and movingly about her Idaho hometown, and I attempted to situate her book among other cultural memoirs (like Hillbilly Elegy) and place her ideas among those of other post-liberal conservatives.

The Incarnational Aesthetic

My personal essay in the Spring 2021 issue of The Hedgehog Review is now unpaywalled. You can read the article here. You can read a bit more about it and how I came to write it here.

I’m making my way through the other essays in the issue, which is themed around the question “Who Do We Think We Are”? Please check out the rest of the issue, as the editors did a great job of selecting articles that would speak to one another. I’m particularly struck by the way my piece resonates with the essay by Ashley C. Barnes, “Toward an Incarnational Aesthetic.”

Barnes attempts to bridge the gap between historicist criticism and an aesthetical approach to art (such as that of the New Critics) by arguing instead for what she calls an “incarnational” paradigm. Art can be transcendent, Barnes claims, but in order to achieve that transcendence we do not need to first consider it apart from its situated-ness in time and place. I’ve always been on the fence about this divide in literary criticism. On one hand I am drawn to art because of its universality and its timelessness. We are all after transcendence, and good art can help us approach it. Yet on the other hand I am aware that this approach can be escapist—a way to avoid talking about the particularities from which art arose, or from facing those specific real-world circumstances about which art impels us to care. The right answer lies in the proper balance of the two approaches, I think, one that does not exclude either sphere from coming to bear on how we view art.

Barnes seeks to strike a proper balance also, and to do so she challenges an unhealthily aesthetic approach. Near the end of her argument, she made a point that made me realize that all along she had been critiquing the same kind of aversion to the physical world that I critique in my own article:

 If we do want to resist the cultural secularization of the present moment—if we are to maintain the possibility that art can baffle capitalism’s instrumentalizing of every last minute of our lives—then we need historicism to help us appreciate art as incarnation.

Capitalism’s “instrumentalizing of every last minute of our lives” is very much what “‘Peace’ and the Organization Kid” is about. The Organization Kids are masters at “instrumentalizing” moments, I argue, at mining our quotidian anxieties, the ups and downs of daily life, turning them into occasions for selling a product. Barnes’ piece got me thinking that in order to do this, capitalism first must extract those occasions from the situated-ness of their surroundings. In order for music to become something Spotify can profit from, that music must have no physical properties at all. At least not on the supply side, that is—the product is digital, and when it hits your earbuds it becomes physical again. In order for companies to profit from a sound—a physical vibration—that sound must be removed from its surroundings, and then it can be replicated, bought, sold, etc.

In this way, the aesthetically obsessed New Critic (not all of them are) becomes an unlikely bedfellow with the Organization Kid. Both, in prioritizing the invisible over the visible, the ideal over the real, dislodge art from its surroundings and (perhaps unwittingly in the case of the New Critic) prepare the way for the instrumentalization of art. In the case of the Organization Kid, this enables art—and more broadly, human experience—to serve as an engine for profit.

Barnes’ essay does a great job of laying out some of the dangers of the purely aesthetic approach. I also think—and Barnes hints at this—that Catholics, we to whom the Incarnation is a central doctrine, have even more reason to be wary of any approach to reality that relegates the physical, time-bound word to an inferior status. Our faith, quite frankly, claims the opposite—that the precise way our salvation was achieved should cause us to love the world in all its particularity. Pope Francis has said as much recently about moral theology.

Perhaps we could say that in our day and age, a truly counter-cultural spirit would manifest itself in desiring those things that cannot be recorded, replicated, or be advertised in any fashion. Playing music, sharing a meal, conversing, giving your children a bath, reading to them, making dinner, sweeping the floor, etc. Things that remain firmly lodged in time and space, which we do not choose to extricate for our own gain.

Of course there’s a very human tendency to “capture” even these non-captured experiences, as if we were lifestyle bloggers, and to market “non-marketability” in a way, even if only to ourselves. This temptation causes us to shift our desire from the experience itself to its outcome—it’s the same mistake that Barnes points out, the same mistake the Organization Kids make. This is the mistake religiously minded liberal arts types often make with the concept of leisure, as if, rather than a “letting-go” and entering into the fullness of experience, Josef Pieper was really advocating for a particular outcome: a comfy state of mind, a non-physical pleasure available only to the aristocratic classes.

Religious contemplation I think helps address all of these tendencies, which are all too human. Contemplation trains one to let go of the insistent need to clutch at things, to obtain and hold onto certain feelings or states of mind, even if they (especially if they) arise from good, healthy experiences. Detachment means detachment from our own ideas just as much as it means detachment from worldly pleasures. In fact, attachment to the former often proves more insidious and demonic than the latter. 

Article on Contemplative Pedagogy at Mere Orthodoxy

Mere Orthodoxy, a Christian online journal, has run a long article (5k words) I’ve written onChristian Pedagogy, C.S. Lewis, and Contemplation. The piece is the end result of a lot of thinking I’ve done over the past few years about what, if anything, should define how Christian teachers teach. Alan Jacobs’ book The Year of Our Lord 1943, which I reviewed for Marginalia, sparked these ideas. His book examines C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, and W.H. Auden, among others, and my ideas here are indebted to his.

Thanks to Jake Meador for some excellent suggestions that greatly improved the piece. If you aren’t familiar with his journal, do check it out—it’s excellent.

More on "'Peace' and the Organization Kid" in the Spring 2021 issue of The Hedgehog Review

The Spring 2021 issue of The Hedgehog Review contains “‘Peace’ and the Organization Kid,” my longish personal essay on my generation’s effect on the way we listen to music. The full article is only available to subscribers, but you can read a little bit of it online before you hit the paywall. [3/26 update: it's unpaywalled now!] As I try to suggest in the piece, the changes that have taken place in our music-listening habits reflect the larger changes that have taken place in the way we understand ourselves. Or, as the issue title puts it, in the form of a question, “Who do we think we are”? I look forward to reading the entire issue.

I was born in 1983, so I’m right around the same age as Marc Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and the rest of the Organization Kids, the ambitious data crunchers whom David Brooks profiled in his Atlantic essay in 2001. To be honest, I never really spent much time thinking about myself as part of any generation, but looking back on it, I see elements of the Organization-Kid mindset in myself—restlessness, an inclination to think categorically, the tendency to see free time as opportunity wasted. No doubt this is why I am fairly critical of it. More on this in a bit.

The essay was a long time in germinating. The idea first came to me five or six years ago, and it gripped me with an intensity that few others ideas have. I knew I had to write about it, for my own sake. I worked on it on and off, and in the Spring of 2017 I finished a draft and sent it out to various journals and magazines, most way out of my league. At that point I hadn’t published much, and the rejections started coming in by the dozens. I held onto it for a few years, revising it from time to time, and decided to send it out again last year. I’m grateful for the editors at the Hedgehog Review for taking a chance on it, and for making it a much better piece than it was. Barbara McClay was especially helpful in cutting the fat from some of the sections, and sharpening the edges of the piece. I have very little experience in writing personal essays of this kind, and only after her edits did I realize how badly the tree needed to be pruned. It’s hard to see those dead branches and broken limbs when you are up close to them, writing about your own experience.

Our music-listening experience has changed rapidly in recent years, including in the 6 years or so that have passed since I first started writing this essay. In 2015 I didn’t have a smartphone, and though things like CD players in cars were already going extinct, the notion of an entirely streaming music library still seemed like a new thing, tantalizing but also vertigo-inducing for folks with hard-copy music collections. Fast-forward to 2021, and things have grown more entrenched. Tangible audio has made a comeback, though vinyl, cassettes, and CDs are never going to come close to the market shares they once had. Even those who appreciate a hi-fi vinyl set-up still stream most of their music. Spotify is king.

Because of the lag between when I started the essay and when it was published, the piece seems like it traffics in a nostalgia that I didn’t factor when I first wrote it. Perhaps way back in 2015 a little bit of nostalgia was there, tapping me on the shoulder, but I certainly wasn’t thinking in those terms. What I meant to say is that I don’t think this is a piece I would have sat down and started writing in 2021 (though I’m glad to have it published in 2021!). And perhaps that’s not a bad thing—to access a particular story, to notice a constellation and have the wherewithal to flesh it out into a recognizable shape, you need to be in a certain place at a certain time. And being an Organization Kid witnessing the rise of technocracy in the late Obama years was that setting for me.

To update one part of the piece: at one point I mention some jazz records I inherited, and how playing them (on an old turntable cabinet I bought cheap from an estate sale), helped me make music physical again. I am sure some vinyl aficionados cringe when I describe dusting off the records with my shirt sleeve before dropping them onto the platter. Fear not—in the intervening years I have become something of a vinyl addict myself. My collection has slowly expanded, and now includes a good deal of classical records as well as some rock and jazz. And I no longer rely on my sleeve to clean the records—I am methodically going through each one, cleaning it properly with a little solution (a drop of dish soap, rubbing alcohol, and distilled water) before entering it into an Excel spreadsheet, checking online to see if it’s worth anything, and returning it to the rotation. It’s all quite Organization-Kid of me, actually. And I suppose it’s only fitting. In any case, I can live with that.

Hope you enjoy reading! In between what I have on the back burner, germinating, and already submitted, I hope to have several pieces published in the near future. Stay tuned!

Alan Jacobs' Breaking Bread with the Dead

My review of Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs' latest, is live at the American Purpose. Thanks to them for the chance to write the review, and to artist R. Jay Magill, Jr. for the outstanding caricature of Jacobs!

Phil Klay's Missionaries

My review of Phil Klay’s novel Missionaries has been published at The Bulwark, a political and cultural journal that emerged out of the ashes of The Weekly Standard. Thanks to them for the chance to write the review! Klay is a former Marine and fiction writer whom I discovered recently through the work of Nick Ripatrazone. (Earlier this year I reviewed Ripatrazone’s Longing for an Absent God in America Magazine, and shared further thoughts about the book on this blog.) Klay’s Redeployment, which won the National Book Award in 2014, is a collection of stories centered on the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The stories are shot through with the spiritual struggle of war, and Klay brings his Catholicism to bear on his fiction in a way that reminds me of Sushaku Endo or Graham Green—bracing, eloquently crafted, and respectful of the irreducible mysteries of our faith. Missionaries does much of the same, tracing these essential spiritual questions in the intertwined lives of several individuals involved in the American conflict in Colombia. Do read the book—it’s excellent.

Casey Schwartz's Attention: A Love Story

 

My review of Casey Schwartz’s thought-provoking memoir Attention: A Love Story is live at Church Life Journal. The review marks a bit of a departure for me in terms of subject—Schwartz’s memoir is neither primarily literary nor religious. Yet, as I explain in the review, I sensed in it fertile ground to explore something I’m interested in: the connection between our social preoccupation with attention in the age of the smartphone, and the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer. Readers of this blog will know of my fascination with Simone Weil, which Schwartz shares; though she isn’t religious herself, her engagement with the French thinker opens her to situating attention beyond the self, an impulse that I argue is fundamentally a religious one. Enjoy!

My Review of Christopher Beha's The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

The American Interest has published my review of Christopher Beha's most recent novel. As readers of this blog might remember, I wrote about Beha's first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, a long while back. Beha occupies an interesting space in the current conversation surrounding Catholic fiction. He seems to be a practicing Catholic, and his cast of characters (which are somewhat continguous throughout his three novels), attended a Catholic prep school in Manhattan and occupy a variety of spots on the practicing/fallen-away spectrum. In my review, I attempt to make the argument that The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is a kind of existentialist-Catholic novel, and to do so I draw upon Beha's recent essay on Soren Kierkegaard in Harper's (which he edits).

Musical Recommendations and Upcoming Writing

I've contributed recently to The American Interest's nightly music recommendations, something the magazine has been doing during COVID-19. I've been playing piano, especially jazz, since I was quite young, and it's been great to have the chance to write about the music I love. Links to the write-ups are below.

Also watch out for some upcoming writing (book reviews and feature articles) at The American Interest and The Hedgehog Review. I will post all links here. Thanks for reading!

On the Jazz Trio:https://us10.campaign-archive.com/?u=f24302ce799fa4d884b86e032&id=03f101253f

On the Grateful Dead: https://mailchi.mp/the-american-interest/tais-musical-offering-harnoncourts-mozart-1285880

On the Left Hand in Jazz Piano: https://us10.campaign-archive.com/?u=f24302ce799fa4d884b86e032&id=4a0104ca3b

On New Orleans Jazz Pianists: https://us10.campaign-archive.com/?u=f24302ce799fa4d884b86e032&id=1973345242

The Jazz Trio

Though I love to read and think about literature, my first love is actually music (I'm a jazz pianist and a dabbler on the guitar). Recently I contributed to an quarantine series of music recommendations that the The American Interest has put out. See my contribution here https://us10.campaign-archive.com/?u=f24302ce799fa4d884b86e032&id=03f101253f.

Further Thoughts on My Review of Nick Ripatrazone's Longing for an Absent God

My review of Nick Ripatrazone’s Longing for an Absent God was published in America Magazine’s Spring 2020 Literary Review. I have a few more thoughts on the book that I’d like to post here.

Review of Ross Douthat's The Decadent Society at The American Interest

My review of Ross Douthat's latest book is live at The American Interest. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/03/18/the-limits-of-decadence/

I hope to post some more thoughts on the book soon. Stay healthy!

Some Upcoming Publications

It's been a while since I've posted anything on here, but it doesn't mean I haven't been writing! A few projects I've been working on:

-a movie review of a powerful film featuring two alumni at my current school (article starts on p. 36) https://issuu.com/portsmouthabbeyschool/docs/bulletin_winter_2020_issu

-a review of Nick Ripatrazone's Longing for an Absent God, forthcoming at America Magazine. Ripatrazone is a writer whom I admire and read frequently, and I was thrilled to be able to have the chance to read and share my thoughts on his new book. I will post the link to the review here when it runs.

-a review of Ross Douthat's The Decadent Society, forthcoming in The American Interest. Ross is a Catholic critic with whom I don't always see eye-to-eye, but whom I respect tremendously. I recently saw him speak in Providence and am currently putting my thoughts together on his thought-provoking new book.