The Montreal Review

Politics, Culture, Ideas

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• THE ODD INKLING: CHARLES WILLIAMS’ NOVELS

  Often overshadowed by his fellow Inklings, Tolkien and Lewis, Charles Williams is perhaps the most enigmatic of the trio. This essay delves into his "supernatural thrillers," revealing them as profound explorations of Christian mysticism and complex theology. Discover the…

• AMERICA TODAY: “MY OPINION, RIGHT OR WRONG”

  'Right or wrong, it's my opinion!'—this fierce certainty, fueled by social media's abstracting power, is ripping America's political fabric apart. Forget nuanced debate; today's discourse traps us in echo chambers, where challenging our pre-set views feels impossible. Discover…

• REMEMBERING MAX WEBER

  Haim Marantz's essay, 'Remembering Max Weber,' re-evaluates the foundational sociologist, arguing his unique strength lies in methodological pluralism, not a single, unifying master theory like those of Marx or Freud. His influential work spans diverse inquiries, from the…

• WRITING WITHOUT STYLE

  Language might seem an essential constituent of identity. It is hard to imagine Winston Churchill orating in anything but English, and Edith Piaf would not have been Edith Piaf in Urdu or Nahuatl. But language is in fact an accident of time and place. Not only are languages…

• TEACHING CHARLIE CHAPLIN AMONG THE POETS

  WAdmittedly, the solution preceded the problem. Or, at least, the practical solution did. This seemed at first provisional. But it helped me to define the fuller ideological problem. About three years ago I began to teach Charlie Chaplin in my course in Modernist poetics and…

• DISPUTATION | Fiction

  Our university sits comfortably on the west bank of the River Spaarne, as it has for centuries, a fixture of the tidy city of Haarlem. Though smaller and less celebrated than those at Leiden, Groningen, and Utrecht, our school is no less venerable...

• INTELLECT VS. REASON: TWO FORMS OF RATIONALITY AND THE FATE OF INTELLECTUALS

  Why did the Russian intelligentsia at the dawn of the twentieth century so eagerly join the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, calling for violence and justifying political terror? And why in the early twenty-first century has a significant part of the…

• DO WE REALLY KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT WHAT JESUS SAID?

  Elaine Pagels recently published what is likely her final work. Certainly it reads like a career summary, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus (2025). We understand her argument better when we recognize that we know virtually nothing of the historical Jesus…

• REFLECTIONS ON MEMOIR

  Recently as one of the requirements in my Masters in Writing program at one of the major universities in North America, I took a workshop in memoir writing. It came as a bit of shock...

• ORIGIN, PRESENCE, AND TIME IN THE POETRY OF W.S. MERWIN

  The keen sense of origin in W.S. Merwin’s poetry, especially in the later work after his move to Hawaii, is and has always been linked to absence, that 'paradise' where things continually vanish from human time...

• THE HOLY AND BROKEN BLISS

  How can a human being maintain identity and sanity in the present world? It is not only the political and social morass that disheartens, but the individual decline in our own lives...

• MACHINES WILL BECOME ETERNAL...

  Machines will become eternal, or at least very long-lived, while we will lag behind them evolutionarily, unable to improve the longevity of our bodies. Or, alternatively, we will be able to integrate machines into our bodies, and this will match the longevity of non-animate…

• AI AND THE FUTURE OF PERSONHOOD | James Boyle

  There is no security . . . against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now...

• HOW WE GOT HERE: CONSUMER CAPITALISM AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

  An ad pops up in social media that catches your eye. You weren’t shopping for anything, but you click on it. A couple of clicks later, your phone autofills your shipping address and credit card number. Shipping is free and, before you quite realize what you’ve done, well, you’ve…

• THE INEFFABLE PASSIONS OF LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

  There was always something tragic as well as touching about Ludwig’s self-willed, hermetic retreats. A rootless fascination with the sense of place, the paradox of all outsiders. Desperate to get away from the cloistered, petty world of academe, Wittgenstein took his Cambridge…

• PSEUDO-SCIENCE AND POTEMKIN HISTORY | By Michael K. Launer

  Kate Brown is a prolific scholar and an engaging writer. Her first two books, A Biography of No Place1 and Plutopia, earned multiple awards from the academic community. In her third book, Dispatches from Dystopia, she refined her personal approach to writing history, which…

• Steven Pinker: On the Problem of Consciousness

  The word 'consciousness' has at least two meanings. One is access to a pool of information shared by a set of intercommunicating neural processes such as those that control language, recall, planning, and intentional movements. That is, some kinds of information in the brain,…

• MORAL PARTICULARS IN LITERATURE | By William Vaughan

  I often share with my undergraduate philosophy students that the value of literature comes not from what it asserts or proposes in the form of propositions, but what it reveals about the humanity of human beings. At the risk of adding one more ‘ism’ to an already impressive list…

• AN ESSAY ON “THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH” BY LEO TOLSTOY

  If I could only understand what it is all for! But that too is impossible...

• WHY HISTORY? | Haim Marantz

  The human being has been described as an essentially historical being, and it certainly is the case that for many reasons he or she necessarily needs to form some conception of his or her past. Without such a conception he or she cannot attain a proper conscious understanding of…

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