Dappled Things

In her recent essay “Teaching Greek to Children in a Dumbed-Down World,” at Hearth and Field, Dr. Nadya Williams explores the way that, as a culture, we tend to silo ourselves, and our children, into supposedly appropriate intellectual spheres. The expression “It’s all Greek to me,” she points out, suggests that there are a great many things, Greek among them, that I simply have no business knowing.

On July 22, 2025, the American Catholic community lost one of its most celebrated poets. Jane Greer (or North Dakota Jane, as she was known online) was the founding editor of Plains Poetry Journal and the author of the poetry collections Bathsheba on the Third Day, Love like a Conflagration, and The World as We Know It Is Falling Away. Jane’s work was also published in the National Review, Modern Age, First Things, St. Austin Review, and elsewhere. More importantly, Jane was a beloved friend.

The Catholic Writer Today: A Retrospective Interview with Dana Gioia a Decade Later In case you missed the wonderful conversation between Dana Gioia and Bernardo Aparicio. It was very good.

Jane Greer: RIP I had other links prepared for today, but the wonderful poet and critic Jane Greer, North Dakota Jane, passed away on July 22 with her husband by her side and I’d like to honor her. Jane was a charming and fun-loving person with a mischievous sense of humor. This may sound like a small thing, but it wasn’t, and isn’t. Charm and humor are totally underrated qualities in our society today.

“Uses of Water” by A.M. Juster A lovely poem from A. M. Juster for the feast of St. Brigid, which, of course, is offers another opportunity for the Irish media to make their perennial and entirely predictable claim that a saint is actually a pagan goddess and Christianity co-opted everything from the pagans and turned into a religion used to control the masses. Kazuo Robinson reviews Ali Smith’s Gliff The narrator of Ali Smith’s new novel, Gliff, is a thirteen-year-old named Briar.

Tessa Carmen reviews The Anxious Generation Wonderful to see this review from Tessa of an important book for all of us, not just parents: I suspect Haidt’s book has been so successful thus far because it not only provides a compelling narrative of how we got here, but it gives us both hope and a clear path of what to do next.

Lord, I do not want to be strong and noble. Your Advanced Placement class can have the backstage passes with the archangels. Let the plainclothes saints win Pulitzers for perseverance. I do not want to snowboard on the Olympic rings of discipline. I am telling you because you know. I pay my gym membership monthly, but the treadmill does not know my soles. I would not mind if my spiritual muscles atrophied from disuse. Let them be like the lanterns I keep on hand for power outages.

“Our Lord Jesus Christ,” St. Margaret Mary Alacoque tell us, “desires that we should, for sanctifying ourselves, glorify His all-loving Heart; for it was His Heart that suffered the most in His Sacred Humanity.” Just under a year ago, Dappled Things challenged Catholic artists to help us do just that by creating new depictions of the Sacred Heart that, with God’s favor, might honor and strengthen this beloved devotion.

We are living through the dumbest time in human history.” Matthew Gasda’s 2022 play Dimes Square begins and ends with this dire proclamation. How can we evaluate whether such a claim is true? What would be the symptoms of a period of unprecedented stupidity, and are they incurable? Through his drama’s implications, Gasda proposes that such a moment—our moment—is not one in which the truth is unknown but rather is evacuated of any capacity to compel action or conversion.