J.C. Scharl is a poet and playwright. Her work has appeared on the BBC and in many poetry journals on both sides of the Atlantic. Her verse play, Sonnez Les Matines, opened in New York City in February 2023 and is available through Wiseblood Books.
Posts by J.C. Scharl
March 06, 2025
There’s a particular pleasure in reading books about making. Business books are “maker” books, in a sense. So are self-help books. The best of these “maker” books are the ones with lots of anecdotes, where we get to see the principles at work.
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February 20, 2025
It seems everyone is talking about how there just aren’t enough babies. The worldwide birth deficit has hit Western nations hard: From the U.S. to Europe, nations have slid below the 2.1 children per woman necessary to keep population stable.
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December 23, 2024
Joseph Bottum’s name is likely familiar to many readers of
Religion and Liberty: From his tenure as editor-in-chief at
First Things to his lovely poetry to his essays at premier venues like
The Wall Street Journal,
The New York Times, and
The Times of London, Bottum has been a leading figure of conservative American letters for decades.
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November 13, 2024
Ted Gioia, in his superb Substack “The Honest Broker,” recently verified one of the most disturbing trends in technology today: the way the presence of AI-created art and images is destroying our access to human-made art and images.
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July 17, 2024
These days, the world of contemporary American poetry is less one world than many. Never has so much poetry been published; rarely have there been more “camps” or “contingents” that have little to say to each other.
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May 29, 2024
A piece of art, completed, represents a long series of choices, from the first choice that artist made to pay attention to the tugging on the edge of his mind to the final daub of paint, deleted comma, or scrape on stone.
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April 02, 2024
Ambiguity is, in a neat mental onomatopoeia, a difficult word to define. But to begin to understand a piece of art like the film
Freud’s Last Session, define it we must, and religious artists would do well to try to understand the film.
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November 15, 2023
I’ve been rereading Milton’s
Paradise Lost. I am not alone in this; earlier this year, every time I checked Twitter, someone was commenting on
Paradise Lost. There seemed to be a gravitational pull toward Milton’s epic.
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