William Butler Yeats with his wife Georgie Hyde Lees, 1923

Yeats and the Occult Imagination

Beneath his poems lay a lifelong devotion to magic, divination, and a visionary system that shaped his most prophetic work.
Patrick White, ca. 1940

The Two Worlds of Patrick White

In writing and life, the Australian Nobel Laureate was ever preoccupied by the search for spiritual meaning and the fraught relationship between God and blundering humanity.
Religious candles placed by religious devotees at a Catholic shrine in San Antonio, Texas.

In Defense of Kitsch

The denigration of kitsch betrays a latent anti-Catholicism, one born from centuries of class and ethnic divisions.