In 2025 I got to reread one of my all-time favorites, "War and Peace." While it's widely considered the gold standard for lengthy, 'classic' novels, this title can often discourage would-be readers from this work, which, while long, never drags. Here, I give you one of my favorite scenes that occurs midway through book one.

Welcome to 2026! But before we celebrate too hard, it’s important to reflect on what a new year actually is. Are we going to keep repeating the same cycles we always have? Are we going to go on making the same mistakes? Or are we going to recognize that Christmas is the date that marks the revolution in our hearts, and New Years an opportunity to set that change in place? GK Chesterton has a choice adventure story in today’s poem that gets to the heart of what a change looks and feels like.

In this video, I talk about T.S. Eliot’s 1927 poem, “The Journey of the Magi.” Dashed off in just forty-five minutes, Eliot’s poem looks at the Christmas miracle from the perspective of the Magi, now grown old and full of years. In the midst of the Christmas season, we can forget that the Birth was not just the beginning of a new world, but the ending of the old. What must it be like, Eliot asks, to live in the knowledge you are between two worlds, having outlived the old, and unprepared for the new?

In this video, I talk about how Keats manages to find enchantment everywhere he looks: in nature, old books, the songs of birds, or here, on a Greek vessel which he’d read about in a magazine. Enchantment, however, is never a simple matter with Keats, who knows well that the spells Fancy draws can be fatal as well as fruitful. Be that as it may, Keats recognizes that enchantment, like beauty, fills and revives a world ever crouching towards death, and it is for this reason, he celebrates beauty wherever he finds it.

Today, I talk about one of John Keats’s most famous poems. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the great poet creates not just an evocative description of a spellbinding song; he goes on a journey in which, bespelled by beauty, he falls into death and dissolution and is ultimately reborn. But how is this two-hundred-year-old poem still so powerful?

As the days darken and the temperatures cool, it’s worth visiting one of the most famous autumn poems of all time. Keats wrote this poem in 1819: an extremely prolific year which saw the writing of some of the most beautiful lyric poems of all time. Who needs Spring when you have October?

As the days darken and the temperatures cool, it’s worth visiting one of the most famous autumn poems of all time. Keats wrote this poem in 1819: an extremely prolific year which saw the writing of some of the most beautiful lyric poems of all time. Who needs Spring when you have October?

In today’s reading, we come at last to the end of the journey. Dante has experienced “the three lives of the spirit.” Having passed through the torments of Inferno and Purgatory and seen literally everything between Heaven and Hell, Dante is at last prepared for his final vision. In this ecstatic world of dizzying heights, he beholds Father, Son, and Spirit as a vast circle of one circumference and differing lights. But language breaks down here. With a humble prayer he turns his thoughts to things eternal: the lights of the stars.