Latest / Sword&Spade / The Gatekeepers of Culture: Gregory Wolfe on Literature, Faith, and the Books That Last
Transcript
- Jason M. Craig (00:06.427) Great, thanks Joe. Welcome back to the sword and spade podcast, the podcast that grew out of the, the magazine sword and spade. If you're still just listening to things online and not holding things in your hand, like excellent magazines, uh, you should subscribe to sword and spade, um, immediately, uh, as an intro to our guests, Gregory Wolf, who appears to be another one of these bookish types. However, before the podcast started, he was smoking a cigarette. to be confused with a cigarette or a cigar. It's a, it's a, it's a low commitment cigar. It's an excellent form of tobacco. Um, it sort of blends the, uh, convenience of a cigarette with the gravitas of a cigar is great. He was smoking one. Sadly, he put it out. I don't know what kind of podcast he thinks this is. Um, but, uh, just to explain to you, mr. Wolf sword and spade magazine was started, um, uh, as an attempt to bring, to create what we call lightning bolts, which is the grand intellectual tradition of the West of our church, bringing it down into the practical lives of men that are actually doing the work of living in and hopefully crafting and creating culture, especially fathers, men of local community, men of rooted place. So we try to blend those two. like to say sword and spade is where the the theologian and the mechanic come together because they both need each other. So welcome to the sword and spade podcast. It's good to have you here. Thank you for giving us your time. Gregory Wolfe (01:42.722) Thanks for having me. Jason M. Craig (01:44.267) I hope you, I'm glad you smiled when I called you bookish. but you nodded, you also have behind you in case someone's just listening. I saw you have some Eastern icons. I think I saw Thomas Moore and Flannery O'Connor. So this is an interesting mix. I'm excited to talk to you. Gregory Wolfe (02:02.386) I'll make room for Thomas Moore there and up above me is Erasmus, his friend, Renaissance humanist, various icons and heroes behind me. It's not, I apologize, it's not really, I'm not really set up for video. I haven't staged myself very well here, but you're right that I'm a bookish guy. In fact, I mean, that's about the only thing I'm good at in the world is I read reading books and making books. Everything else up to and including light bulbs scares the crap out of me. books, reading them and making them, it's just the, you know, sometimes God just gives you one gift and you got to run with it. So that's my gift. Jason M. Craig (02:31.664) Well, they're not. OK, how. Jason M. Craig (02:40.302) Wow. Jason M. Craig (02:50.734) That's right. Yeah. Well, come on. Then I'm going to press you. I'm going to ask you about your books and why in the world you're still making books in 2026 when we can just talk across the interwebs. what you, but I'm going to press you, give me one other thing that you are interested in and that you do do one other craft, one other occupation. Gregory Wolfe (03:14.766) Well, it's baseball season, so thank God for that. And thank God that, you know, I'm going to be rooting for my fantasy baseball teams, which take up, it's sort of my nightly liturgy is setting my lineups for the next day and searching the waiver wire for picking up the hot new batters and pitchers. Baseball is sort of like I say, it's my, it's my liturgy for six months of the year. Jason M. Craig (03:18.582) there we go. Jason M. Craig (03:44.849) Okay, okay, see, there you go. Interesting, I don't do anything with baseball, nothing. But I seem to be the only one, especially in my community, so that I have an envy for your love. I wish I could cultivate it now. It's probably too late. Yeah, it's probably too I mean, I could try. I grew up in the middle of North Carolina, so. Gregory Wolfe (03:48.962) keeps me sane. Gregory Wolfe (03:56.046) you Gregory Wolfe (03:59.576) There's always time. You can have a late conversion. Jason M. Craig (04:08.4) College basketball, you know, if it's going to be March, you know, I'm still thinking college basketball. It's hard to get shake that as your main sport. OK, so then how did you maybe give me the arc of how you came through? My understanding is is teaching, writing and now publishing. What's kind of the arc of that story? Gregory Wolfe (04:29.986) Well, I would I would actually say that publishing was there from the very beginning. In fact, I recently found somewhere on the Internet a picture from my high school yearbook. I guess there's a lot of nostalgia, especially for people of my age. In fact, I just received the invitation to my and this will date me pretty precisely my 50th reunion class reunion for my high school graduating class and. The photograph of me from the yearbook just has a very simple caption, editor in chief. So I began with what I would call my junior high school literary project or calling it a magazine is. Jason M. Craig (05:05.688) Ha ha ha. Gregory Wolfe (05:18.318) perhaps a little too generous. It was a series of sheets that they made on the old mimeograph machines, which you're probably too young to have ever encountered in the flesh, but they were these rotating drums that were filled with a kind of purple toxic liquid that had a very pungent smell. It's probably taken a couple of years off my life. And, uh, And it was very damp and wet when the paper came out of the other side. But I remember very clearly this would have been, you know, I don't know, eighth grade, seventh grade, a few stapled sheets with some poems by my classmates and me. And I really haven't stopped since then. you know, did all the high school literary magazine, high school newspaper, college literary magazine, college newspaper. While in college, I started a national literary and political journal. And then years later, I founded a national quarterly journal of art and faith called Image. And I edited that for 30 years. And now, of course, I'm publishing books. So that's really been the through line in a way. I mean, in addition, I sort of the array of related things of yes publishing always but then teaching certainly editing speaking anything to do with the word literature is my natural forte but I have a great deal of interest in music and especially the visual arts painting in particular also sculpture architecture the journal I edited for many years image was again, primarily a literary journal, fiction, poetry, and what we call creative nonfiction memoir essays of various kinds. But it also featured essays on contemporary artists and musicians. So the publishing has been the through line. where did that come from? My dad was in advertising. So as a kid, I grew up with him. He had a light table, one of those old light tables. Gregory Wolfe (07:37.43) And again, we're talking the 1960s and 70s here. So the technology was T-squares and X-acto knives and another toxic substance called rubber cement. And he would, you know, cut pictures out and paste them on the, you know, on the page and design. He would put words and pictures together in beautiful ways that were compelling. And I guess I, you know, I got a lot of my vocation from him. My mother took me to the art museum and the symphony. So I guess I'm really the product of those two streams coming together. Jason M. Craig (08:18.266) Sure. Yeah, that's beautiful. think, I can't relate to a young age being, brought into those where I was, I was later convert. Although a recent guest said that, Very often a young man's mind isn't even awake at those ages. So he was trying to give me a pass for watching Beavis and Butthead instead of reading anything, which was kind of them. But what might I ask really quick? Was the smell of the machine with the turning drum? Is it like ammonia smell? Because I used a. OK, I used a. Gregory Wolfe (08:38.798) Fair enough. Gregory Wolfe (08:50.348) not quite that harsh it was a little gentler than that Jason M. Craig (08:55.812) I got the, well, I got the privilege of being able to use a, old blueprinting machines when I'd used to do landscape design, where you draw the design on a vellum paper and then you run it through a blueprinting machine, which just reeks. And I'm pretty sure the smell is ammonia. It's awful when it comes out with what we know, but we now call blueprints that don't, don't think they really exist anymore, but the paper came out kind of blue. Well, that being said, has your interests, would you, You know, I'm a I don't write and I written nearly as prolifically, but I've written things and sometimes the longer I write, I realize what Wendell Berry says is true, that every author really has only one thing to say. It just says it in different ways, perhaps different slants, as you might put it. Have you kind of settled into? What you as far as the slant publishing your publishing house now, what is the? I guess the central thread of your publisher, you know, there's different, we've had the privilege of talking to now like three publishers recently, which has been fascinating because it seems like a lost art or a dead craft and I think in many people's Although it's not, mean, books are still being produced wide open, but is there a central thread right now with slant publishing? And maybe part of that answer could be explaining which, which I have an inkling of why it's called slant. Gregory Wolfe (10:23.47) Certainly, yes, it's a great question. I just came back from Atchison, Kansas, where I gave a speech at Benedictine College. It was the first time I'd really written out a talk in many a year. I've been so preoccupied trying to get a tiny indie literary press off the ground that my own writing is really had to take a backseat, which is fine because I, again, I feel that publisher and editor is probably my primary vocation. But in writing this talk, I kind of had to shake out the cobwebs and really reflect on what was most important to me in my own vocation, my own personal journey. And so I gave it a somewhat facetious title. The title of the talk was based on an old Flip Wilson comedy sketch. This will also date me because Flip Wilson's comedy show was in the 1970s. But as a kid, I loved it. And he had this skit that he did regularly where he was He was a pastor, a somewhat dubious, morally dubious pastor of a big, like a mega church. But I love the name of the church that this pastor Leroy was in charge of, the Church of What's Happening Now. So I gave my talk that facetious title, The Church of What's Happening Now, but I gave it a subtitle that... Jason M. Craig (11:50.874) Yeah. Gregory Wolfe (11:59.242) actually tried to explain, you know, a little bit more fairly and accurately to the people listening what it was. So the subtitle is Art, Beauty and the Need to Make it New. So I decided in this talk to really grapple with the idea that art has to make something new. And I knew that when I did this, I was wading into very hotly contested territory because you know, a lot of our natural revulsion against art that we don't like, and legitimately so, is precisely against art that's trying to be original, right? That is the cult of originality, the cult of genius. We're all sick and tired of the artists who make something either outrageous or impossible to understand in order to seemingly rub it in our face. And so I get that. I'm 100 % sympathetic. I've done my own slagging off of that kind of stuff, which is of which there is never any end, know, from from Marcel Duchamp's famous, you know, taking a men's urinal and turning it upside down and calling it a work of art to a couple of years ago, somebody duct tape a banana to a wall and called it art. I get that. I get that and I get the kind of almost weird sort of spectator sport of just sort of scorning this kind of crap. I get it. At the same time, I had to ask myself, what have I been doing for 40 years? I've been trying to find art, new art, art that's new by new artists. And I had to had to find a reason for why newness is important. As a person of faith, You know, in the Bible, yes, there's, I think, Ecclesiastes, who's, you know, bit of a curmudgeon, says there's nothing new under the sun. And we know that's true in a way. But on the other hand, at the other end of the Bible, in fact, pretty much near the end of the Bible, Jesus says to us, behold, I make all things new. And so I had to ask myself, what is good? Gregory Wolfe (14:21.482) about newness in art. And I realized that art is always changing. Artists are always trying to get away from cliche. They're always trying to get away from anything that might put us to sleep. Anything that might just be same old, same old. And yes, they can vary in how they do that. They can, they can try to, you know, be transgressive or just absurd and, and be ridiculous about it. Or they can try to find something new out of their dialogue with the past and their awareness of the world that they live in and out of that kind of collision between the past and the present they can forge something new and as I thought about it I realized you know if you think about the history of Western art you know even within just the Christian centuries the last two thousand years what were the first Christian Artworks. Well, they were basically adaptations of Greek art instead of the god Apollo You had Jesus and Jesus carrying the the lamb around his shoulders The the good shepherd the Jesus the good shepherd looking exactly like Apollo looked and so then you get all these changing styles you get Byzantine and Romanesque and gothic and high Renaissance and mannerism and Baroque and Rococo and romantic and on and on and on. And I realized that, you know, newness is an important value. And so I've been in search of the new and we could go into, you know, in greater detail defending this. I won't, you know, kind of talk for the entire time we have in one go here, but I'll just say that is what I've been thinking about. Why do I want to find something new? Why does creating something new and being attentive? Why should we as members of the church, of members of society, of members of the human race alive at a given place and time actually care about what's happening in our time? I mean, I'm as big a traditionalist as you can imagine, but I also care about what's going on around me. Jason M. Craig (16:31.876) Yeah, well that's interesting. Jason M. Craig (16:39.908) Well, that's what I was going to ask you about. I many men find themselves eventually, you know, traditionalist by inclination, by nature, by instinct, simply as a not that it's reactionary, but as a reasonable response to the cult of novelty, which is a constant and utter and expensive failure. So at the same time, I think of another publisher, you know, Frank Sheed. last century how I believe you he was a man who obviously grasped the tradition of the church he knew I mean he was very intelligent was able to take and honestly I think he's much of the inspiration behind the ideas of sword and spade is needing to take the richness and say it again to the people today. And this was very different from trying to be relevant, but he would say, we need to rearticulate the faith every 20 years. I believe I read him saying that one time, which is just, and at the same time, he's a man of deep tradition. know, he still would have been steeped in a very visibly, tangibly traditional church. in when he grew up, you know, prior to Vatican two, especially, but at the same time recognizing, but he wasn't, I think what people would think of a traditionalist today, he wasn't merely curating the artifacts of the past, or making, you know, copy pasting them, into where he is now. He was still interested in doing something new. So I guess that's my question. Help me reconcile in my mind. Cause I'm the same way I'm like, I'm done with the banana on the wall. I'm done with novelty in the church. I'm done with, you know, constant attempts at making something relevant. which at the same time as upon arrival is irrelevant. The moment you begin the project, it's, it's a failure. It's DOA as they would say. but at the same time, I would never. Jason M. Craig (18:42.902) Want to say that our Lord does not inspire artists anymore. mean, that seems foolish too. So I haven't thought about this as much as you have. Maybe maybe you had to reconcile this at the talk at Benedictine. But help me, Rick, help me. How can we be someone who's excited about we what we will make? By the way, I'm a I understand you're you're a big fan and friend of the late Stratford Caldecott. who had this sort of towards springtime that I loved in his writing and expected something. But a lot of us kind of feel, think particularly at this point, it doesn't really feel like a springtime anywhere. So anyway, help me to reconcile or maybe explain a little bit more the difference between what sounds like your life's work, which is finding new stuff while... being in the stream of tradition itself. Gregory Wolfe (19:46.316) Yeah, that is the question. And that is what I wrestled with in the talk and what I've always wrestled with from day one. By the way, I think my, my, my bona fides for being a traditionalist are pretty well known at this point. mean, I, heck, I teach in a graduate program devoted to classical education. So, and, you know, throughout my teaching career, you know, teaching Homer and Virgil and Dante. and Augustine and so on. So yeah, that's my grounding. I think. Jason M. Craig (20:19.458) no, Mr. Wolf, you've, you've got it all wrong. You have to be reading the right blogs and listening to the right podcasts in order to be a traditionalist. don't know this Dante Augustine stuff you're talking about, but I'm sorry. Continue. Gregory Wolfe (20:29.186) Yeah. Well, we can maybe get back to that, I'm going to put that on your somewhat facetious comment to one side here. But I'll tell you, I'll make it concrete. I'll make it absolutely completely concrete. So I went to Hillsdale College, which is a deeply conservative institution back in the 1970s. And I Jason M. Craig (20:36.164) you Gregory Wolfe (20:52.694) was committed to conserving Western civilization from the beginning. But at some point during that time, even as an undergraduate student, I thought to myself, well, if you want to conserve something, you want to keep it alive. That is, you don't want it to be dead. You don't want it to be just in a museum. You want it to be like a living thing, like a living tradition. So who in the modern era is doing this? You who's preserving this faith, this central Christian faith that animated me that I wanted to believe was still relevant to our times, could speak to our times. And again, for me, it was always a matter of literature and the arts. So I got introduced to T.S. Eliot and I started to read T.S. Eliot. And actually I started by reading his essays, which were very conservative, very traditional, very, you know, he converted to the Church of England and, you know, kind of in midstream and shocked a lot of people. Poor Virginia Woolf was so shocked. She had like a migraine for five days and, you know, how in the modern secular progressivist world could one of us. T.S. Eliot go back to such a troglodyte faith as Christianity. But he did. And I was sort of pumping my fist, you know, thinking, you know, in the 1970s, here's a guy who thumbed his nose at secular liberalism. And at some point, though, as I kept reading, I realized he was a poet and that maybe his essays actually grew out of his being a poet. and gave him whatever authority his essays had was that, you know, he was good at making poetry. And I was suddenly shocked. I was like, wait a minute, the Wasteland, the love song of J. Proof Rock. This is like modern art, man. This is fragmented and full of all this alienation. And and I was like doing a double take because how could you be both this deeply conservative defender of the faith? Gregory Wolfe (23:07.934) and this writer of modernist poetry. And I had a really good teacher who said to me, he gave me one example. said, Greg, you're fretting about this use of fragments. He uses these fragments like a little phrase here and there. And I said, yeah, that means he's celebrating destruction, Ruin, everything is in fragments. He said, well, that's one way of reading it. But think about this, he said. A fragment used to be attached to something else, right? And I said, well, yeah, okay, fine. That's true. He said, well, take this fragment from his Elliott poem, Ash Wednesday, this little fragment, after this our exile. And I thought, well, that's just modern alienation to feel exiled, to feel estranged from the world. Everything's terrible. Woe is me, despair, suicide, blah, blah. said. Do you know where that comes from? I said, no, I don't know where that phrase after this our exile. He said, well, it comes from a prayer, it comes from an ancient, this is before I was Catholic, by the way. So I can be somewhat excused for not knowing this great Salve Regina, Marian prayer of ours. But it was after this our exile, show us the blessed fruit of thy womb Jesus. And he said, isn't what Elliot is doing is pointing out, what we've forgotten by omitting it, making us wonder what what's the rest of the phrase putting two together, making us do some of the work as readers. Yes, not just handing it to us on a platter, but precisely energizing us and engaging us in a process of reflection on what's important. What have we lost? You know, what could we get? What could we renew and restore? And from that moment, I immediately understood that all great art in a sense is new in its time. And we could go, I mean, you name it, I'm here all day if you need me. We can go through all the classics and say how they were shocking, how they were transgressive in a sense in their time in a way that we don't remember anymore because it's so distant in time. mean, just to give you one example and then I'll shut up for a few minutes is, Gregory Wolfe (25:32.845) Michelangelo's Pita. Okay, we think of it as kind of like, you know, the great work of Catholic religious piety. And who you know, it's in the Vatican, for goodness sake, right? Well, it was scandalous at the time. for a number of reasons, including the fact that it portrays the blessed Virgin as young or maybe even younger than her son. There's a kind of sensuous beauty to the scene of the dead Christ in her arms that seems out of place for a moment of mourning and desolation and loss. I could go on. There were like riots in the streets of Rome. In fact, later on in Michelangelo's life, when he became super pious, he rejects, He disowned the P.A. ta. He said that was a mistake. That was one of the worst things I did. was sensual. It was inappropriate. And yet to learn that now is shocking because we think of it as being as traditional a work of art as you can imagine. I realized that if you use a little bit of historical relativism, not metaphysical relativism, not the bad relativism, but just comparing how art appears. There was a BBC documentary years ago about modern art. It was called The Shock of the New, because the new is shocking. It's not like anything else. We don't like change. We like things. We want things to stay the same. But all the great masterpieces were shocking in their time. So I then thought I need to find a way how to find the good new stuff and separate it out from the bad new stuff. But newness is inescapable. Jason M. Craig (27:23.042) Yeah, I what's the, what's the difference? I mean, I guess there'd be a distance, a difference of just the obvious substance, right? Something like piss Christ, right? The submerged crucifix, which I won't even describe any further is awful blasphemous for the obvious shock. There's, there's part of me is just like, You're bored with the shock. I'm bored with the shock when it comes to modern art in that sense. Like, okay, you're so out of ideas, you're taping bananas to the wall. So again, maybe I'm just pressing the same point. Have you found a way? Because I, you know, just to give another analogy, there is a shock to new forms that become necessary for the present moment, which is why, for example, people might not know, you know, the mendicant orders of the Dominicans now or the Franciscans now that we accept and we love, they were scandalous because they were not cloistered. mean, they were not in the monastery where monks belong. And this was so scandalous that Aquinas's family didn't want him to join those young upstarts. So there is times where the church calls forth, excuse me. I think there's times where God calls forth something new. It seems like when the church calls for something new, it goes really poorly. when, when, and I got this from, a little series of talks by rat singer. He basically says that the genuine movements of the church that are later recognized as movements, IE God has done this. God has moved. They're almost always in conflict with the institutional church. always and she exists and that's okay. She's the guardian and corrector of things, but she doesn't ever seem to have really good ideas from sort of a top down like setting. And this is something maybe just in the modern era I'm more sensitive to where it's sort of even the papacy itself is meant to like set the tone of the global conversation of faith as if that's possible. so there is obviously a shock that is not originating from, Jason M. Craig (29:36.165) I guess what I would describe as a father, it's not the hierarchy, right? It's not the dad, it's the children with the shocking new idea. What do you mean we're gonna do it this way? But I still press you, but you would, I remember being very moved by Roger Scruton documentary on beauty and art, where he simply said art in the past was meant to reveal beauty to us, and modern art is just meant to shock us. But you're sort of saying, well, there is sort of a shock value. I had no idea the pieta was rejected by its master, you know, later. Is that though the... Is that really something we can depend on? we just going to get, is that like a high that just gets us sort of drunk on the high of the shock? mean, it seems like something hard to seek after, to persevere in, to keep alive. You know, the kids the other day asked me, we live out in the country, so there's a lot of signs for revivals. You know, at these local churches, they have revivals. Well, what's a revival? I'm like, well, It's something that when it's almost dead, you try to revive it back to life. And if you do it as many times as these people do, you might just need to let call it, call it a day and admit it's dead. But no, keep going on your revivals. My local friends. good. it seems as if a man who's steeped in tradition, is it just, does it come to, mean, Jason M. Craig (31:10.768) I mean this sincerely, people like you who have more wisdom and experience to tell us, hey, this was shocking and now it's classic. You can jump on board, it's okay. Is it just a... Gregory Wolfe (31:24.49) It's the natural rhythm of the way that culture processes the shock of the new. think that in my talk what I did was I quoted without telling the audience who I was quoting. I quoted three arts, three Catholic writers from the 20th century. And I quoted all the condemnations from like Catholic critics of those Catholic writers, you know, that they were deterministic and alienated and don't deserve the name Catholic and all these other things. And then I revealed that they were Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Flannery O'Connor, who from our perspective in the 21st century, we look back to, I mean, almost all, even conservative Catholics. look back to the 20th century and extol those writers and say and some of them actually extol those writers and say I wish we had somebody as good as Flannery O'Connor today or Graham Greene well they forget they forget because you know I Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory was a book that was condemned by the Holy Office formerly known as the Inquisition now known as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith Why? It was a novel about a priest who was an alcoholic and had fathered a child. O'Connor used violence in the grotesque, know, which were shocking for obvious reasons, like they're literally shocking, not just because it's a different style, but because it's violence in the grotesque. And from the perspective of time now, we realize, no, she wasn't writing deterministic books that were God just came down and threw lightning bolts and and destroyed the Gregory Wolfe (33:29.548) characters. No, she wrote about prideful characters. The violence that they experience is not God shooting lightning bolts at them. It's them trying to be God themselves and just getting in their cars and running into the brick wall of reality. And in fact, the moment of violence in O'Connor, most people nowadays are at least dimly aware of, is the moment actually when you get knocked on your ass. And you're you got the Tweety Birds going around your head. You're looking up to heaven is actually the moment where you're where you are offered grace, where you are offered the possibility of conversion. And so, you know, we have now absorbed O'Connor into the larger cultural understanding because it took a while. OK, and this is how it happens. But. because of the nature of the speeding up of change and the digital revolution and frankly, some, I would call it ideological culture war temptations that we fall into, what I call declineism, the belief that, you know, it's all decline and fall. And this can lead people into a conservatism that literally is no longer conservative because it thinks what was once alive is now dead. And we can't revive it. We can only study the past. But that doesn't conserve, that doesn't keep something alive. And it was writers like Eliot and O'Connor that kept the tradition alive for me. And I think the new writers, the writers of the 21st century are being ignored because we've convinced ourselves that it's all bad. And I just, you I don't stand, I don't hold by that. I think they're there. I'm trying to find them. Jason M. Craig (35:26.159) Well. Jason M. Craig (35:30.267) Well, that's excellent. Are the. You know, I think now if I were to want to. Listen to stories, well, this is going to sound self focused because it is that's, you know, for myself is normally where I experience the world, and I'm very frustrated in the church on, you know, the calls to reach the periphery. And and the outcasts and the. not, you know, just, just those, you know, and I grew up in, in very poor places. I wasn't myself in want, I wasn't hungry or anything like that, but you know, really rough neighborhoods and saw really rough things and came to Christ later in my teen, later, late teenage years and had always sort of, as we said, we were Protestant, had a, had a heart for those people. and then when I see within the church, a, call to go out and be loving and reach. I don't believe them because it's also couched in all sorts of other ways that they're excusing themselves. and it, it sort of wraps up in sort of all kinds of other ideas where it's not actually telling the story of these people. And if that, if that sounds vague, for example, what I mean is that is the church saying, Hey, let's go reach these people, who are mostly torn and living in terrible states of humanity because of the sexual revolution. I mean, that's objectively the reason behind the decline of their own places and communities and families and the misery they live in right now has so much to do with the sexual revolution itself. Just, I mean, just full stop. And if there was someone out there who could speak to the pain of... divorce, the pain of, of that sort of abuse, it would, but a lot of times the very people that say, it, let's go reach and be compassionate are also rehabilitating the sexual revolution at the same time. So very often I find it more refreshing to find a story, a narrative where someone does find redemption. in, think someone, you know, the, the, someone heard, used the phrase dirtbag Catholicism, just people that are really trying hard to make it from. Jason M. Craig (37:47.921) from the ground up. So I'm not sure if that makes sense, but what sort of, if Flannery was bringing, Flannery O'Connor was bringing out the pride, which she was, I mean, you know, my son went to go read one of them. She was, said, I'm going to read some Flannery O'Connor. I'm like, I don't know. Tell me what, he's young, he's 13. I just, you know, I don't want to take away the shock of it, but you know, like the story's going to end with, and then the boy hung himself in the attic, you know, the end. See ya. That's how it's hanged himself. That's how it's gonna end. Her stories were telling the stories of pride. And I think if there was anything in the mid, the early 1900s, mid-century, we can fix the world without God. That was the promise. And I think now, there's a little bit. So I think really going after pride was something universal, but very telling at that time. In the stories you're reading now, and that you're finding now, what... Is there something that you're noting that is the story we need to hear, the shock that we need to hear in our presence setting the way Green and O'Connor did in their time? Gregory Wolfe (39:01.186) Yes, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff that's out there. mean, it doesn't necessarily, again, look like what mid 20th century writing looks like. I've, I've actually written about this, you know, during that time period, you're right. There was a big sense of, this was like the, the prime battleground, the 20th century between sort of atheism coming out publicly as part of what any modern intellectual, you know, self-respecting modern intellectual would think of themselves as an atheist. And it was the time where, you know, Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, these were all, as they've been called, master narratives, these grand ways of accounting for human nature and human history that were literally like sumo wrestling with Judeo-Christian tradition, the other great master narrative that tells us a story of who we are and what our destiny is. And that was why writers in that time period created stories that had these big almost comic book kind of clashes between. these different worldviews in some ways I what I wrote I be I got I one of the authors I most love a southern writer from your neck of the woods not as well known as she should be Doris Betts not Catholic but secretly told me she wanted to become Catholic an exquisite novelist taught at Chapel Hill for many years she told me once I love Flannery Flannery is like my you know my my my influence but Jason M. Craig (40:38.064) you Gregory Wolfe (40:49.854) I'm not flannery and my culture is not flannery. It's much more, you know, it's not this big battle. So much has been forgotten that for me, grace isn't experienced in violence. It's more like the still small voice. It's more like the whisper, not a shout. know, O'Connor said, for the heart of hearing, you have to shout. Well, Doris Beth said, no, I have to whisper. For me, when I write a story, I want these characters that go through suffering, they go through confusion. they are searching for renewal, they're searching for redemption. When it comes, it's quiet. It's simple. It's like, did I hear you correctly? You know, to the universe? It's tentative because we live in this culture that's lost so much of continuity with church teaching and the presence of faith in our lives. So it's being rediscovered kind of quietly through this still small voice. And I found that the whisper, a lot of contemporary writers are whispering about faith because that's the world that's the postmodern world we live in what it'll be like in 25 years I don't know you know after I'm gone presumably something else but you're right just like the orders of the church things arise artistic styles arise like orders arise in response to what's going on at the moment and every classic that was ever published is that same result of the collision between the tradition that's inherited and what the heck is going on these days. Jason M. Craig (42:24.42) Right. That's interesting, the still small voice, because you can't help but think of the age of the internet and just constant noise. If there's a word for different moments in time, ours is just noise. It's so much noise that... Gregory Wolfe (42:48.14) Well, and in the midst of noise, can be hard to hear the voice. And again, to extrapolate from what we were saying earlier, there's such negativity. I respect Roger's scrutiny, but I think that that attitude towards modern art is a little bit too easy, to be honest. It's a little bit too like shooting ducks in a barrel. because there's, you while there's tons of horrific and vulgar and just ridiculous stuff out there, there are writers out there. I mean, take, for example, contemporary novelist, he's barely known among Catholics, which is kind of crazy to me. His name is Christopher Baha. I mean, he was the editor of Harper's Magazine, for goodness sake, like one of America's leading intellectual cultural journals, right? He is... educated by the Jesuits at Regis College High School in New York City. He's forthright, but he's just published a book about why I am not an atheist, okay? A major public Catholic intellectual who also happens to be... a successful novelist writing novels about contemporary American postmodern 21st century distracted life from a point of view of explicit Catholic faith. How many people in your podcast have heard of Christopher Bayhaw? would like I would guess almost none. And that's that's kind of on us as as people in you and I are people are we're cultural gatekeepers, right? We do the podcast. We publish the journals. We publish the books. It's up to us to spread the word that, you know, our tradition isn't dead, that there are people like Beyhaw out there. Or take Phil Klai, example. K-L-A-Y. It looks like Klai, but apparently he's pronounced Klai. He won the National Book Award for his book of short stories. He was a Marine. He served in Iraq. Gregory Wolfe (44:36.726) He writes about the military. doesn't scorn the military. He was a member of the military. He writes about that from his perspective as someone who tried to fight in a morally compromised war as someone who in America, believes in the military, believes in the Marines. But he writes from this Catholic perspective of awareness of suffering and moral reasoning that he too was a Jesuit. Regis High School in New York. graduate and he's the winner of the National Book Award. How many people he writes he just has editorials in New York Times like every couple weeks or so. Major Catholic figure, young guy, probably not even 40 yet. How much do we know about him? How you know, my particular publishing company, Slant, is attempting to find people like that. Jason M. Craig (45:30.619) That's fascinating. Cause you know, you hear the literary revival, you know, of the Chesterton's in the bell locks and you think, I wish we had those people today. It sounds like you're saying, well, we do. and perhaps we do. Yeah. And that I perhaps though, that's the sadness of, know, this is, and this interests me heavily because I am a convert from noise. I am a convert who had his tastes. Gregory Wolfe (45:44.354) We do, and we don't know about it. Jason M. Craig (46:00.624) poorly formed in lots of ways in my younger age and is attempting because I know intellectually these things and I would like to embody them and incarnate them in my life. I'm learning to appreciate. And if there is one thing that's keeping me from it, it's actually just the overabundance of stuff to read, learn and know. what you just said, you just said, well, we need the gatekeepers. And I think of my friend, Connor Gallagher, he's the president of tan books. I get to talk to him frequently and kind of see some of the back end of publishing and things these days. And he says, and he was saying one time, I hope he doesn't mind this. If he does, we'll. We'll do a response video on YouTube and he can and then we can get in a public spat against each other But I don't think he'll mind he was dealing with some sort of problem that basically arose because half of the people out there That have big audiences Don't have big audiences like Catholic enforced because they've necessarily grasped and embody intelligently the traditions because they're entertainers and they're good at the good at the medium of the internet and they have you know as John senior said they have the unfortunate ability of being able to talk without necessarily having the it's it's it's the rhetoric I mean it's it is you know the the age-old war between Joseph Peeper talks about in abusive language, abusive power is can we use the persuasion in our ability with words to essentially make money? And the answer is yeah. And he said, in the publishing business, and he's been in it for a long time, his family, I think he's like third generation, publishing various, not just handbooks, other, just they publish books, that's what they do. He said, this used to be given over to the experts, and now we have to deal with everybody. Jason M. Craig (48:07.704) And I think there's part of us that would, know for me would know this is the, this is the Democrat, this is the time of democratic. Jason M. Craig (48:18.2) artistic criticism, you we don't need these gatekeepers anymore. But I'm listening to you and thinking, I know that you're right. And I would like you to be the gatekeeper. I think maybe that's the finding a good publisher like slant. Maybe this is a recommend. I'm thinking out this out loud, but as a recommendation, find a publisher that you trust, you know, and read and read their books because On the one hand, there is, you the other John senior, you know, read the saints because they know what they're talking about. But then there's the Frank, she the faith needs to be re articulated, you know, every 20 years or so. I think it's essential that we do find. I had no idea. No, those the names you're mentioning. If you're telling me we've got modern day Chesterton's out there engaging the culture, I would. I would laugh and look at some Catholic media feed and see if they're there. If they're not there, they're not real, you know. I'm receiving that as a challenge. you, so if you don't mind though, tell me, think just cause I do know why, why, cause it can seem like such an unnecessary endeavor to continue to slog out books in an age of digital stuff and podcasts and like, you know, the thought of publishing books and you, but you had the very reason might be in the name of slant. Tell us what you're doing with that quote and that name and perhaps why you've chosen some of the authors you have chosen. Gregory Wolfe (49:51.215) Certainly, yeah. I mean, it's of course a famous quotation from Emily Dickinson, and she said, tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies. Circuit meaning roundabout. And that's really saying, it's really the rationale of art in the first place, that art isn't... We wouldn't need art if the only way to tell the truth was literal propositions, utilitarian bullet points. We need at times to be converted, to be captured, be shocked, to be taken unawares. And art works in this between the lines way, this more intuitive way of the imagination, not pure rationality. And we need that. need it's like any it's like how to be healthy. Well, you need good diet. You need exercise. You need, you know, a rounded human experience. And, you know, reason is good. And I will never do it down, you know, but imagination is also part of who we are. mean, Jesus told stories. OK, he told very puzzling. you know, shocking stories that people didn't like because they didn't seem to make sense. They seemed to upend normal human ideas about what was fair, what was just, what was normal, what was given. And so this imaginative approach is part of what we need. We need sometimes something to worm inside our heart. and break up that hardened heart that we have or that dulled sensibility that distracted sensibility being art has this possibility of James Joyce who was maybe rejected the church but Catholic in his sense to the core said that great art delivers an epiphany right epiphany a moment of revelation you know a moment of truth Gregory Wolfe (52:10.54) coming through beauty. That's what art is. It's truth coming through beauty and coming through this indirect mode, Experiential, not rationalistic. So this is, and the popes have consistently repeated over and over again that artists are crucial to the life of the faith and that Benedict XVI said again and again that the two best advertisements for the church throughout human history have been one, the saints, two, the art that has grown up from within the church. And so that to me is, you know, a reminder that being alert, being aware, like being hungry for who is carrying on the tradition in our present day is important because the artists of today are giving us insights into you know, what's going on today in a way that we can use it's we can read Homer, but that doesn't Homer doesn't automatically help us to, you know, deal with TikTok. You know, maybe, you know, you could you maybe draw some lines here and there, but We need a balanced diet of tradition and present in order to keep that tradition alive. Without readers, these writers are going to go, they're going to starve. No one's going to buy their books. So I just feel that my vocation has been to be at that. I'm the bloodhound. I like going out there and finding the talent and it requires talent. mean, I'm not going to just publish somebody because they're they recite the catechism. I mean, We have to uphold excellence. mean, Catholic writers and artists have to compete in the marketplace. We have to be as devoted to our craft, even more so. I mean, this is the kind of thing O'Connor said. She said, I'm a writer, I'm a Catholic, but that doesn't give me a shortcut. You faith doesn't make you, you got to put your 10,000 hours in, as Malcolm Gladwell would tell us, to the craft. So I go out, I look for the writers of, Gregory Wolfe (54:20.65) of faith, yes, but also the writers who have done the homework, who've done the craft, who create works that are going to endure. And sometimes they're Catholic, sometimes they're not Catholic. mean, O'Connor once said, sometimes the best Catholic novelists don't know they're Catholic. For example, I just published a novel called Child of These Tears. which is a reference to St. Augustine, it's from his confessions. But it said, and I'll shut up after this, it's set in the early 1700s in the colonial era. It's about a girl living in a puritanical household. who's kidnapped by the Indians because the French and the British are fighting each other. So the Indians are coming down and raiding and slaughtering, but also abducting hostages. And this girl gets taken up to Quebec and she gets put into a Native American environment, but she's also then catechized by a Jesuit missionary. And what slowly starts to happen is that her perception of the world starts to change. what her father's strict disciplinarian punishment, beating the child when they're, is opposed by this more lenient kind of nurturing Native American environment. Her literalistic religion is replaced by this Jesuit who's constantly holding up the monstrance, this very concrete image of Christ in the Eucharist. and she begins to change. I won't give away the plot, but it's an incredibly profound love letter to the Catholic vision of the world by somebody who's not Catholic, who's seeking. She's a Protestant writer married to a Jewish guy, but this is the most deeply Catholic thing I've read in like 10 years. And I published it. So patting myself on the back for that right now. Jason M. Craig (56:15.376) Well, all right, well, repeat the name of it again. Let's give it a good average. Yeah, that's excellent. Perhaps we need to have a space for you in the magazine regularly, just recommending the new stuff because we have a tendency to. want to bring men into contact. You for example, our first issue was every man has to read the Odyssey because our guys, we I think we understand a lot of our readers are our men that are are busy. They're raising families and they recognize that they were likely poorly educated and poorly formed and they see and believe by faith in the Catholic faith and the truth that surrounds it. And they have this idea that, it should be embodied in culture and reality and all this stuff. But, you know, it's hard. It's the inner man's a big ship to turn, you know, in the way that we sort of understand and see the world. So we tend in the first issue, we wrote things like you need to read the Odyssey, like you need to recover classics. So a lot of introduction to classics we've we've. But perhaps we need more space to to some shock and awe. these new things. Maybe maybe maybe we should have you on there Mr. Wolf at some point. Of course, well we've had you on the podcast. Maybe we need some more recommendations in the magazine of new things. Gregory Wolfe (57:35.296) More than happy to oblige, for sure. Jason M. Craig (57:37.841) Okay, well, that I'd like to, this has been delightful. We're coming out, I would like to send everybody to Slant Books. They're now officially a friend of Sword and Spade. We don't have a stamp yet for you, but we'll get you one. It's meaningless, just so you know, I'm totally flexing a muscle that's not there. But in sort of parting advice, I'd like you to give advice to, and I've asked this for a number of publishers and authors recently. Gregory Wolfe (57:53.774) You Jason M. Craig (58:06.512) for men that have a hard time. I got a friend of mine just saying, I just don't get poetry. I just don't get it. I don't get it. I don't think I'll ever get it. But a sort of defense of your need for art if you don't care about art and you were not formed to have a taste or a sensitivity to it. But then also more importantly, why don't you give us a father, a man who is coming to grips with how hard it actually is to raise a family and the ideals he's trying to instill become difficult as life keeps getting, you know, in some ways more complicated with more life, but also more beautiful. Maybe give us a book recommendation for that man in that scenario. Gregory Wolfe (58:56.952) Well, I know that I recently published a book by, again, a neighbor of yours, North Carolina, a wonderful writer, Eastern Orthodox by tradition, named Tony Woodleaf. It's a beautiful novel, heartbreaking novel called We Shall Not All Sleep. It comes, of course, from St. Paul, the famous quote, we shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed in an instant. And it's a story of fathers and sons. And it's a beautiful story, a story of a father who fought in the Vietnam War and came back somewhat scarred by that violence. He's also got Native American blood, so he's somewhat shunned by the local populace. becomes kind of a pariah, maybe even a scapegoat for the local community after he accidentally kills a boy and runs over a child who runs out suddenly in front of him. And the story is really from the perspective of the son who sees his father who's capable of violence, incredible violence, but also deeply wounded by the rejection he's experienced and. wanting, you know, this son tries to, feels like maybe I should become as violent and alienated as my father. it's also about local community and how to be a part of a community. There's this grandmother character who's just this incredible force of stability and rejection of, you know, living tradition in her. community upholding it against all the economic, you know, the condos and, and the, and the shopping malls that, that threaten, you know, the traditions and the local shops and all of that. This, this novel, We Shall Not All Sleep is really, it's a novel for men, you know, it's a novel that's unapologetic about being father, about fathers and sons, which is not exactly the most popular category in the New York Times these days. So I would recommend Gregory Wolfe (01:01:06.416) mean, is a book. Phil Kly, I mentioned his book of short stories about the military. mean, look, yes, they're short stories. Maybe you don't read them every day, but they're about soldiers, right? They're about men who have fought, who've made vows, who've made commitments. They're not about, it's not a book about intellectuals. It's not a book about, you know, art aficionados or kind of wine connoisseurs. It's a book about soldiers. I mean, Every man has always thought about whether they should have enlisted or what that means to a man to potentially think of themselves fighting in a war or serving in some capacity. These are writers, Phil Kly, Tony Woodley, who I think are writing books that anybody can relate to. It's not like... This is, you you take your casserole, you'll take your medicine, you know, the dose of art. These are stories that are gripping. They're not scary. But yeah, sometimes it can be a little, you know, difficult to dip the toe in at first. I get it. But I'm trying to show that there are writers that aren't necessarily kind of at the far reaches of experimental complexity or... you know, refinement, but are writing about real people dealing with real, real, real daily stuff that we all recognize and have to cope with on our own. Jason M. Craig (01:02:31.428) Well, that's excellent. OK, we will maybe we'll link to these books in the show notes and be grateful. We'll work out some sort of discount code. I'm sorry. It's the age of discount codes for sword and spade readers. But we were happy to recommend Slant Books, Mr. Wolf. And thank you for being on the sword and spade podcast today. Gregory Wolfe (01:02:45.55) You Gregory Wolfe (01:02:54.318) It's been my pleasure.