About The Christendom Review
The Christendom Review is a literary journal dedicated to the Diaspora of Christendom, that remnant of people who either deliberately or intuitively subscribe to the Judeo-Christian and ancient Greek traditions of the West and to a particular vision of humanity, a vision explored by many of our finest writers: that man is an ensouled creature made in the image of God, “born to trouble” (Walker Percy) because of original sin, and in need of a rescue that cannot be delivered by Specialists. As Andrew Lytle’s character in The Velvet Horn, Jack Cropleigh, reflects, “Travel as he will, a man is only circling his predicament.”
We also subscribe to the philosophia perennis, the view of the artist inherent among all traditional societies, from Neolithic man to Christendom: that the artist is one who “makes” rather than one who “creates.” Poet, sculptor, architect, and painter, indeed the practitioner of any craft, “works with givens, the stuff of creation” (Darius Lecesne). Such an artist recognizes the givenness of his or her own being as “intellectual soul incarnate” (Marion Montgomery) and is aware that he or she imitates the Creator in a very indicative way: that is, he or she “manufactures,” in the old sense of the word, things (e.g. poems, paintings, wood carvings, furniture, tapestries). “If the work is beautiful, then God is praised, for phenomenal beauty invariably points to transcendent beauty, and hence to beauty’s source, God Himself” (Darius Lecesne). As Jacques Maritain observed, when we “experience beauty” it leaves us with the residue of both our ancient stain and our hope, “a longing for a more perfect Beauty” (Darius Lecesne).