What We’re Reading
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart." Perhaps there is an American "Crime and Punishment" in Edgar Allan Poe, that master writer of Gothic horror that centered on…
Sermon of the Sparrows
Go sit on your porch. This place will teach you Everything you need to seed and grow. The sermons of sparrows will rise to greet you, So…
The Haunting Wages of Sin in Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a classic of Gothic literature, dark romanticism, and an enduring reminder of the reality of sin…
It’s the Economy, Stupid
During the 1992 American presidential campaign, Democratic strategist, James Carville hung a sign in Governor William Jefferson Clinton’s campaign headquarters with three phrases, including the now famous…
Some Notes on Contentment and its Opposite
1 Happiness is contentment when nothing’s happening, Is not the bliss of not missing out on some moment Gone almost before we are or were aware…
Book Launch
For David Chan When my friend and fellow-poet launched my latest book, reciting chosen bits and some whole poems, the customary gathered handful listened in respectful silence…
Prophet of the Therapeutic: Philip Rieff and the Unmooring of Modernity
A longtime sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Philip Rieff analyzed the telltale signs of a culture approaching its crisis point. Well-versed in history, literature, and…
Gnostic Fools Make Our World
If the reader has grown weary of waking up to the sound of the same old dusty drumbeats of contemporary politics playing the usual ideological tunes of…
The Clockmaker
O, what if we were wrong? What if the far-distant clockmaker, mechanical God, tick and tock taker, disdains efficiency, preferring song. All the pride of human wit,…
A Soaring Adventure
In the poem ‘Mythopoeia,’ which critics speculate is addressed to C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien makes the case for mythology as a means to understand reality: He sees…
Notes on Perils and Possibilities of Human Exceptionalism
The modern academy is in a crisis. We are splintering under the weight of a disorienting shift drawing us beyond pluralism, a welcoming of diversity, toward relativism,…
Vine and Fruit
Like the fruit in the youthful Tree In the easterly garden long ago The Lord Jesus wants us to see The life-giving food He does bestow And…
Giving Tuesday
VOEGELINVIEW is free to read but depends on the generosity of its readers to ensure the highest quality of cultural and intellectual commentary is given to the…
From Prodigy to Pioneer
In his remarkable memoir The World of Yesterday, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig described Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century as a place of unbounded optimism…