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
November 25, 2025
It’s unusual to be in the situation of reviewing a book no one will like. I don’t mean that literally; a handful of people will appreciate Paul Kingsnorth’s new book,
Against the Machine, probably the same people who have followed his work for the past decade.
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September 29, 2025
A new biography of a great man, especially one whose life is already rich with lore, is a delicate task. There is the temptation to attempt something new, or worse, to try to make the story “relevant”—even “urgent,” heaven forbid—by inserting into the great one’s life some zippy contemporary narrative (usually sexual).
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August 05, 2025
I am a self-proclaimed Inklings appreciator. From C.S. Lewis’s critical essays to Charles Williams’s doctrinal horror novels to Owen Barfield’s strange and marvelous metaphysic of symbols, this little group of writers has my heart.
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June 19, 2025
In the past 15 years or so, the general turn among Christians of all stripes (even, perhaps counterintuitively, Christians on the very far right) has been away from a rationalistic approach to the Faith and toward an affirmation of the mystery behind its doctrines.
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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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