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May 13, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Stanley Fish |Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Timothy Carney
The smell of hot canvas, now rare in my life, can set off an explosion of memories so powerful that I wish I could work out what other aromas I might seek out to pierce the veil of the lost past. There was a lot of camping in tents in my childhood, almost all of it mixed up with school rather than home. And in most cases those tents were the heavy old sort, as used by the children in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons stories. It was emphatically supposed to be good for us.
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May 10, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Stanley Fish |Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Timothy Carney
Once, when I was young, for a period of three months, I was a man of science. When I entered college, I had the aspirationally hard-headed idea that I would get a degree in something quantitative and make a lot of money afterward. The storms of freshman year drove that ship of theory onto the shoals of my profound mathematical incapacity—if the footmen of mental sums tire you, what will the mysteries of matrix algebra do?
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May 9, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Stanley Fish |Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Matthew Walther
Many years ago, when I was a novice and my habit was still dazzlingly white, I said to one of the older sisters, “I think we should all get wimples.” She replied, “That’s because you have no idea what you’re talking about.” I was a little surprised by this answer.
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Apr 30, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Matthew Walther |Stanley Fish
Last week, I spent about two hours speaking with Father Justin, the first large language model chatbot ostensibly raised to the priestly order of Melchizedek, while his counsel was still available on the Catholic Answers website. He has since been defrocked, in large part because of people like me.
Like most of this A.I. priest’s conversation partners, I was less interested in learning about Catholicism and more interested in testing his (its?) intellectual boundaries.
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Matthew Walther |Timothy Carney
University administrators faced with sit-ins, tent encampments, and other forms of protest continue to betray an inability to understand their situations.
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Matthew Walther |Timothy Carney
I have started playing the piano again after a hiatus of a decade and a half. After a combination of parental moves, the family piano finally landed in my office, reviving adolescent dreams of holding little salons enchanted with my prowess (or, at least, bare competence). I paid to have it tuned, broke out the old yellow dog-eared Complete Hanon, and started pounding away.
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Apr 12, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Peter Hitchens |Matthew Walther |Helen Andrews |Carino Hodder
My first cigar was smoked at the end of the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. I was a recent initiate to the mysteries of tobacco, and I knew nothing about cigars; I selected the stick based on budget (not large) and the appealing harlequin figure on the label. I bought three, one for myself and one for each of my roommates. We smoked them on the steps of the library in contravention of recent rules about smoking on the quad.
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Apr 10, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Dan Hitchens |Helen Andrews |Matthew Walther |Timothy Carney
I want to want to be a theater-goer. I like the idea of being a metropolitan person, thoughtful and open-minded, leaving the T.V. dead and blank and the computer switched off, to spend brilliant evenings in London’s West End, laughing at clever jokes. How wonderful to continue in the Athenian tradition, established thousands of years ago and still living. How, well, civilized.
But like most of my efforts to be the sort of citizen I once wanted to be, I have never really managed it properly.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Peter Hitchens |Matthew Walther |Helen Andrews |Jude Russo
The case of Father Marko Rupnik, accused of the psychological and sexual abuse of multiple religious sisters over the course of three decades, has prompted a discussion in the Church about the relation between sacred art and the sanctity (or otherwise) of its artists. Is it right to display art in consecrated places whose creator has a “sexual obsession [which] was not extemporaneous but deeply connected to his conception of art and his theological thought”?
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Mar 8, 2024 | 
thelampmagazine.com | Paul Griffiths |Helen Andrews |Peter Hitchens |Sam Kriss
Why do so many horror movies feature nuns? This question has been on my mind in one form or another since 2018, the second year of my novitiate, when The Nun was released. In the U.K. the film was advertised with billboard images of the film’s protagonist, Sister Irene, wearing a white veil and habit, viewed from behind and apparently facing a blank wall.
