by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

On The Millions, a Lenten Listicle

It'sapt that a Catholic literary critic, and one with curriculum-forming aspirations, would elevate the listicle into a ritual and a penitential practice.

I mean Nick Ripatrazone, who has a piece up on The Millions called “Forty for 40: A Literary Reader for Lent.”  It only looks like a listicle: it’s a several-thousand-word piece of criticism in compact, an enlisting of the calendar for an intervention in the running conversation about literature and belief.

It’s a real intervention.   There’s plenty on his list that I haven’t read.   The reading for Day 32 (Thursday March 26), for example –  “Blessing the Animals” by R.A. Villanueva:


Villanueva crafts quite the scene to begin this poem from his debut, Reliquaria: “In a parking lot beside the church, cleared / save for bales of hay and traffic horses,” are goats, llamas, border collies, and terriers. Someone “will garland parakeets with rosaries.” Cats are held like children as the priest crosses himself “beside the flagpole where I learned to pledge allegiance.” The narrator’s daily ritual is to fold the flag into triangles and bring it to the headmaster. Villanueva’s poems contain two planes: the devoted, lyric representations of faith and tradition, and the mischievous human impulse to break free. However responsible the narrator might be, he is still a young man who would dare a friend to “throw a bottle of Wite-Out” at the statue of Jesus in that same parking lot, who would taunt God one moment while kneeling to pray to him the next.

My own reading plan for Lent involves renewing an old intention and reading José Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which James Wood somewhere called one of the truly great works of religious art he’s ever encountered.   

If the novel eludes me – again – because of the quotidian demands of the calendar, then bound proofs of Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski’s The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams are at the ready.   Reading that book will produce another list of books to read.  

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