The Lamp Magazine

The Lamp is a journal dedicated to Catholic literature, published every two months. Our goal is to provide readers with unique insights through detailed reporting, sharp commentary, and reviews of books and the arts. We aim to present a viewpoint that is often missing from other widely-read magazines in the English-speaking world: the perspective of unwavering Catholic orthodoxy.

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Habemus Papam

5 days ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths

In the blue afternoon the bird appeared, perched on a high roof in the capital of the world. It was a seagull, dancing in the sun. Perhaps it felt lonely, for it was soon joined by its mate and their hungry offspring. Indifferent to the cheers below them in the ruined circus and to the old men who lurked in the gilded ossuary chattering and marking bits of paper destined for oblivion, the mother spat out the corpse of a rodent, which the chick happily devoured.
A Chicago Yankee in Saint Peter’s Court

6 days ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Jude Russo |Paul Griffiths

America has finally joined the ranks of great Western civilizations and produced a pope, along with the Italians, the French, the Germans, the Greeks, the Dutch, the Jews, and, somewhat inexplicably, the Poles.
The Indispensable Genre

2 weeks ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Joseph Epstein |Mary Rogers |Peter Hitchens

The sad fact of it is that any idiot can write a book. If you write two hundred words a day for a year, taking off on the weekends (don’t want to strain the system), at the end you will have a manuscript of respectable proportions that you can inflict on contest judges, agents’ slush piles, and so forth. It’s comparable to becoming fit; but, unlike becoming fit, I’ve actually done the book thing a few times.
Sawn-Off Bareness

3 weeks ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Mary Rogers |Peter Hitchens |Matthew Walther

I have just failed to preserve a beautiful tree from being felled. Worse, I have become complicit in its destruction. I may never be sure that I did the right thing. I hate the cutting down of trees, even though I know that it is sometimes necessary. Trees are the lovely works of God, still living in every city among the ugly works of man. These large friendly vegetables are not just plants, but stores of goodness, peace and calm. I once tried hugging one and got nothing out of it.
Playing For Zero

1 month ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Peter Hitchens |Mary Rogers |Matthew Walther

I’m bad at games. I always have been. My competitive chess career ended in middle school, when I decided that spending a day of Swiss-system combat at a school library in the lugubrious suburbs of Baltimore was not worth it if I wasn’t going to place. My brother was more naturally gifted, as seemed to be the case in most of these sorts of things, but he was young and undisciplined, so he didn’t pursue it much longer than I did.
Time’s Arrow Only Points Forward

1 month ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Matthew Walther |Peter Hitchens |Ross Douthat

Not far from the house where I spent my infancy and early childhood was an abandoned sanatorium. It had been built in the Thirties for tuberculosis patients, and closed in the Eighties on account of asbestos and lead. A decade later it already looked as if it had been empty for a century: ivy up the red-brick walls, trees growing against the foundations, every visible window a black hole with a ring of dental glass.
Zero Behavior

2 months ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Ross Douthat |Peter Hitchens |Matthew Walther

I used to be a movies guy. I called the movies film or even cinema, and I was the film editor on my college newspaper. I had the same boring opinions every twenty-one-year-old liberal arts major has about movies, but I thought I was very daring. Movies, like much of my life in those days, were a higher-order form of sloth.
Lone Bell Tower

2 months ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Matthew Walther |Peter Hitchens |Ross Douthat

From my chambers in the county courthouse, I can hear the bells of my parish church. The tinny Runic rhyme wells outside my window, between the courthouse and the jail, across to City Hall and the crooked lines of tent villages beside the park. If one is quiet, the bells are even discernible at the bottom of the hill, in the business district. They are merry bells for weddings, and somber bells for funerals, and irksome bells that remind me that there is a holy day that I forgot.
Accidental Pilgrim

2 months ago | thelampmagazine.com | Ross Douthat

I am a Christian, a practicing member of the Roman Catholic Church, a conservative Catholic by the world’s standards, a bit more uncertain about my conservative Catholicism than some of my co-religionists, a bit weirder in some of my ideas about the cosmos compared to most of my secular friends and some of my religious ones as well.
All Shall Wax Old

2 months ago | thelampmagazine.com | J. Vance |Matthew Walther |Peter Hitchens |Mary Rogers

Cupboards and attics are dangerous things, as are wardrobes. They lead you to places which are not always very like Narnia. I generally avoid peering into such places in my own house, staying busy, traveling many miles to an office most days of the week, arriving home after dark for most of winter, too tired or otherwise engaged to patrol my own sovereign territory.