Spencer Klavan

Nashville

Host at The Claremont Review of Books Podcast

Associate Editor @ClaremontInst, Editor-at-Large @theammind. Host @ynghereticsshow (https://t.co/Lm2SSFUtIJ). exclusive property of @joshuaherr6.

Articles

The List #63: A Confession

6 days ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

I wish I liked classical music more. I consider it a flaw in myself, not the music, but I confess it’s just never my first choice of things to listen to. I’ve found other forms of high art to be like coffee or wine—you have to cultivate a love of them at first, but then you start to seek them out of your own accord. They become some of life’s richest and most exquisitely varied pleasures.
Letter #238: Two Deaths, One Life

1 week ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Dad,As a scholar, it’s my job to pop in from time to time and note that absolutely everything has been thought before by someone. Personally, I find this comforting. Most people find it excruciatingly dull. Some people find it infuriating. I like to amuse myself at parties by testing to see which is which!Let’s play that game now.
Letter #236: Ye Shall Surely Die

1 week ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Join us for another livestream! A week from today (Tuesday, May 13) we’ll chat with subscribers on Substack at 6pm ET. Dad,Congratulations on this essay and on the powerful book it’s drawn from. Our readers will be jealous to know I got an advanced look at it, and I loved it. You should be very proud. “Death writes the rules of the game,” you say—in murder stories and in life itself. This was the curse, or perhaps simply the consequence, that we met with when we strayed off God’s path of life.
Letter #235: Going Somewhere?

2 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Dad,For a while when I was growing up, people used to worry that all the cool kids were moral relativists. Then one day everyone kind of looked around and realized they weren’t, at all. The bawling Hamas groupies that trash Harvard Yard and Butler Lawn aren’t fired with the passionate conviction that nothing is either good or bad, right or wrong. They’re in no doubt at all that the good people—themselves—are right, and the bad people—Jews, mostly—are wrong.
Letter #233: Enchantment Regained?

2 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Dad,I distinctly remember a conversation you and I had back when I was in grad school. After a long analysis of some Bible verse or other, you turned to me and asked, “are we becoming Jesus freaks?”I confess it hadn’t really crossed my mind. You had grown up around New York sophisticates who associated religion with kookery and woo-woo.
List #62: Mythic

2 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Whenever a friend has a new baby, I send them a copy of Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths. I remember being entranced by my copy as a kid, luminously illustrated and filled with strange, alluring creatures. The power of these legends is visceral; they somehow capture earthy universal truths while also remaining endlessly fresh and surprising. They can be quirky to the point of being bizarre—women turn into cows and trees; cosmic super-intelligences make fools of themselves for love.
Letter #231: We're the Shadows

3 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Dad,Nothing could possibly have stemmed the flood tide of bad art that was bound to inundate us both after I said there are no truly great paintings of the resurrection. And some of it, as you say, was truly abysmal. If for example this is your counter-example to my claim,then I’m not sure we’re even occupying the same dimensional plane. Stuff like this doesn’t just make me convinced I’m right, it makes me want to jump off a bridge.
Letter #229: Eye Has Not Seen

3 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Dad,He is risen! And this year, the Eastern Orthodox calendar lines up with ours, so I guess that means he’s also risen…in Greek!I’m so glad we all got to spend this Easter x 2, Resurrection Boogaloo together. The older I get the more I think there really is nothing like this holiday, nothing like this story on earth—from the unbearable confrontation with the crucifixion dark to the baffled delight of resurrection morning.
Letter #228: Father, Forgive Them

4 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Dad,I’m sure you saw the story of Jeff Metcalf, the father whose 17-year-old son was stabbed to death after asking another kid to move to a different seat at a track meet. The boy bled to death in his twin brother’s arms, his whole life tossed aside in an instant of animal cruelty. And yet, said his father, “You know what, I already forgive this person. Already. God takes care of things. God is going to take care of me. God is going to take care of my family.”There was a furore over this.
Letter #226: This One Weird Trick

1 month ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Pops,I can tell you made a big impression on Aristotle back in the day, because he actually responded to your concern about the golden mean in a passage at the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics. It might be my favorite thing he ever wrote. And he didn’t even credit you in so much as a lousy footnote. Jerk. Anyway I like this passage so much, and I think it’s so important, that I spent some time yesterday getting into the Greek and translating the key sentences myself.