A World for Wonder

Mary Beard’s case for the classics begins with curiosity—and offers a way beyond the familiar story of the humanities in crisis
By Abram Van Engen

news

See All

Podcast

Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

Listen Now

Podcast

Eminent Americans

Eminent Americans is a weekly podcast about the writers and public intellectuals who either are key players in the American intellectual scene or who typify an important aspect of it.

Listen Now

opinion

See All

Letters to the Editor

The Irresponsible Magid

 Shaul Magid’s essay “Kahane Nation?” (Sept. 10, 2026) moves quickly from Meir Kahane’s advocacy for violence in the late twentieth century to American Jews buying firearms in response to antisemitism in the past few years. Magid then reminds readers that Kahane’s movement provided security at synagogues and protested anti-Israel events. “Sound familiar?” he asks.  That rhetorical question is the problem with his “argument.” Yes, synagogue security sounds familiar. So do Jewish fears of antisemitism, doubts about institutional protection, protests against…

Saul Bellow’s Mysticism

By Todd Shy
Mysticism is having a moment. A number of recent books by philosophers explore the topic, or related topics, with sympathy, including James K.A. Smith’s Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark (2026), Clare Carlisle’s Transcendence for Beginners (2026), Simon Critchley’s Mysticism (2024), and Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections (2024). And it’s not just academic philosophers: Michael Pollan’s quest to understand consciousness led him, in A World Appears (2026), to affirm “some thrilling remainder of mystery” about our experience of the world, and Meghan O’Gieblyn, in her remarkable memoir Will and Attention (2026), reflects with sympathy on female Christian mystics. In fiction,…

essays

See All

reviews

See All

interviews

See All
Blake Smith: How does Christianity help us mediate, as you suggest, between the worst sort of collectivism and the worst sort of individualism? Or perhaps mediate is the wrong word, since these two “worsts” do so often go together! Let’s say, transcend?
Julius Krein: I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than Christianity’s consciousness of the division between the City of God and the City of Man, “render unto Caesar,” and so on. But this distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic religions as well as ancient paganism and, I would argue, “rational” philosophy. This distance allows for another dimension or perspective from which to approach the relationship between the individual and the collective.